


Disasterology

by provocative_envy



Series: unfinished [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Creature Fic, Drama, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Infertility, Mates, Medical Experimentation, Miscarriage, POV Female Character, POV Third Person, Pregnancy, Romance, Veela! Hermione
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-25
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-02-24 09:41:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2576930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <br/>
  <i>She wakes up at exactly midnight on the eve of her nineteenth birthday—</i>
</p><p>
  <i>She screams.</i>
  <br/>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

* * *

 

 ** _Introduction_** : _p. 2 – 26_

 

* * *

 

**_(title page)_ **

She wakes up at exactly midnight on the eve of her nineteenth birthday—

She screams.

She is vaguely aware of Lavender and Parvati scrambling with their bed hangings, frantic voices calling out for Harry and Ron and Ginny and Professor McGonagall— _oh, God, she’s scratched herself, look, look at all the blood—_ and she feels a hand on her forehead, registers the removal of her nightgown and the emergence of a fresh set of flannel sheets— _impossibly high core temperature, Poppy, this is not a simple fever_ —but her teeth are chattering and her thoughts are spinning and she can’t quite speak, can’t quite explain that she is not ill, no, she is not in pain and she is not in danger, no— _send an owl to her parents right away, Minerva, we may have missed something important in her ancestry—_ because she is _disconnected_ , she is a trillion separate threads of magic being torn apart and rearranged, twined and twisted and tied tight, knots unraveled and body chemistry recalibrated—

She is burning from the inside out.

She is shedding her skin and losing her center of gravity.

She is _changing_.

 

* * *

 

**_(table of contents)_ **

She spends three days behind a starched white curtain in the hospital wing. She isn’t allowed visitors, but a new stack of library books appears on her bedside table every few hours—they’re not textbooks, are completely unrelated to any of the classes she’s taking that year, and their subject matter varies from regional Bulgarian history to romantic fairytales, field guides on the mating habits of golden eagles and comically outdated treatises summarizing the finer points of muggle genetics research.

She writes _Veela?_ on a spare scrap of parchment and tucks it into the front cover of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_ ; she receives a compendium of Greek mythology later that day, two red satin bookmarks flagging the sections that focus on Sirens and Harpies.

She sighs, frustrated and frightened and _off-balance_ , craves the grounded concrete stability of logic and reason, needs to fill in the blanks and reconcile who she had been with _what_ she is now—

She holds up her hand.

She wonders how many other choices she won’t be allowed to make.

She watches as her fingernails lengthen and sharpen and curve down at the ends, like talons, wicked and deadly.

She is dangerous.

She is _different_.

 

* * *

 

**_(foreword)_ **

“It’s strange,” Ginny remarks casually, the common room fire crackling behind her. “You look exactly the same. Aren’t Veela supposed to be all blonde and shiny and… _tall_?”

Hermione snorts, rolling up her essay on the reactive properties of crystallized water and mandrake root—she has exceeded the two-foot limit by four and a half inches, but she doesn’t think that Slughorn will notice once she accepts his invitation to his quarterly dinner party.

“I’m a hybrid,” she reminds Ginny. “Other than some interesting physiological responses to anger, nothing else is wrong with me.”

Ginny plucks at the ruffled feather end of her quill.

“I didn’t say anything was _wrong_ with you, but yeah, Veela are kind of mysterious,” she muses, settling back against a pile of tartan crimson cushions. “Dad says there isn’t much published about them beyond the raging sex appeal and, you know, the _actual_ rage. Is it true that you’ll have a mate?”

Hermione fumbles with the zipper of her herringbone satchel.

“Um, Dumbledore was rather vague about that,” she hedges. “All he told me was that there were a lot of misconceptions about Veela mating habits. I didn’t get the impression that I would be affected, though.”

Ginny chuckles.

“Pity,” she says, stretching out her legs. “Would’ve been an ace excuse to blow off McLaggen next Hogsmeade weekend.”

Hermione winces.

“Not really,” she says, fiddling with the rolled-up sleeves of her blouse. “My Veela mate could have been worse than him—it’s not like I would have had any control over it.”

Ginny pretends to shiver, scooting closer to the cast-iron grate of the fire.

“Lucky you, then,” she says, tucking a strand of red-gold hair behind her ear. “It’s bad enough that all of this _latent magical creature_ nonsense had to manifest so weirdly—would’ve been triply awful to have to deal with a crap mate at the same time.”

Hermione manages a small smile.

“Yeah,” she murmurs. “Lucky me.”

 

* * *

 

**_(exhibit i.i)_ **

The dreams start in late October.

The moon is full, a brilliant blue-silver circle in the sky, and the ghost stories are rampant—there are scores of dead leaves, yellow and brown and orange, wet and brittle as they stick to the bottom of her shoes, and there are a hundred floating pumpkins in the Great Hall, carved and glowing, macabre grins lit up with the flames of cinnamon-scented candles. Ron laughs too loudly at Seamus’s jokes, Harry blushes when Ginny leans across the table to kiss his cheek, and Lavender draws a cartoon skeleton on the back of Hermione’s hand with a tube of mascara and an ivory lip pencil.

Hermione goes to bed early.

She turns down her blankets while her body is still warm from a mug of spiced apple cider.

She yawns into her pillow.

She lets her eyelids flutter shut—

She is not prepared for what happens next.

 

* * *

 

**_(disclaimer)_ **

“I need you to explain to me exactly what is going on,” she says, voice tremulous—and her heart is racing and her claws are peeking out and she knows, _she knows_ , that her eyes are flashing that famous crystalline Veela blue—

Dumbledore studies her for a long moment, bony fingers laced together over the smooth mahogany surface of his desk. He looks sad.

“You’re a hybrid, Miss Granger,” he eventually replies. “Which is unusual on its own, of course, but your case is…particularly unique.”

She stares over his shoulder, counts the methodical _drip drip drip_ of his antique bronze water clock.

“Because I have no recorded magical ancestry,” she says in a dull monotone. “And my heritage chose to present itself—late in life. Is that correct?”

He sniffs, adjusting the knot of his celestial blue dressing gown.

“Yes,” he says slowly, “it is. However, I did not anticipate—you see, Hermione, hybrids very rarely exhibit any true Veela characteristics. They may have an inherent affinity for music, or an uncommonly strong libido around times of peak fertility, but they generally are not able to shift into their true forms. Their access to those traits almost always remains genetically dormant. And they are therefore not _vulnerable_ to the less well-known markers of the Veela species.”

She flinches at the reminder that she is no longer human—that she is _isolated_ , separate, even more of an outlier.

“The dreams?” she prompts, swallowing.

“Describe them for me, please,” he says, clearing his throat. “What did you see? Where are you located? You’ve already mentioned that you cannot wake up on your own when you’re in the middle of one, but what does the tether feel like? Is it an emotional pull? Physical? Do you panic inside the dreamscape, or are you not affected until you return to consciousness?”

Her gut clenches— _who_ did she see, not _what_ —

“Blond hair,” she says, quiet and tense. “I see blond hair and grey eyes and—that’s it. Nothing is specific or all that distinct—I may be in a bed, I suppose, but the _tether_ is…physical. Tangible. Like I’m tied down.”

He purses his lips.

“Blond hair and grey eyes,” he repeats. “Is there any…recognition? A face, perhaps?”

She grits her teeth, anxiety swelling. She hadn’t wanted to admit—hadn’t wanted to _acknowledge_ —

“Draco Malfoy,” she says abruptly. “I see Draco Malfoy.”

 

* * *

 


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

 

 ** _Chapter One:_** _p. 27 – 49_

 

* * *

 

**_(evolution)_ **

He corners her in late November, after Potions, in a shadowy, dead-end dungeon corridor.

His eyes—liquid and grey, familiar, unfamiliar, sharp like thumbtacks and cutting like steel—are _tired_ ; black-red specks of dried, flaking blood are crusted under his nose, a faint fingerprint smear of pink dragging to the left, up towards his cheek.

She’s on her period.

She feels nothing for him beyond the normal emotional cocktail of ambivalence and contempt and nuanced, wholly instinctive restraint.

It’s a brief respite, she knows; her new body rejects contraceptives, the Veela mating genes overriding the packet of tiny white pills she’s always taken to manipulate her cycles. Her hormones aren’t even her own any longer—she estimates that she has five or six days before the dreams start up again.

“ _Granger_ ,” he spits out, voice furious, shoulders hunched, the crisp black collar of his jacket digging into the underside of his chin. “What—did—you— _do_ to me?”

She bites her tongue.

“What happened to your nose?” she asks, genuinely curious; he’ll think she’s taunting him, she recognizes a moment too late.

He draws his wand smoothly despite the visible trembling in his hands, and she wonders absently if he practices that particular motion.

“Like you don’t _know_ ,” he scoffs, glowering down at her.

She sweeps her gaze from the top of his head—fine blond hair, silky and nearly colorless, so different from her own—to the polished, squared-off toes of his boots; he’s quite tall, slender and almost preternaturally graceful, but otherwise he’s unremarkable. She supposes that in a certain light he might be considered handsome. She doesn’t understand. Why him? She has a fleeting, bitter thought about his status as a Pureblood; she disregards it. She doesn’t _understand._

“The dreams…will get worse,” she says with a clinical sort of detachment. Dumbledore had been honest about that, at least. “I’m sorry for that.”

He presses the tip of his wand against her sternum for less than a second before jerking backwards, seemingly without meaning to.

“ _What_?” he demands, incensed. “What are you—what did you _do_ to me?”

Distantly, she hears the tinny, blaring sound of a bell ringing; she wants to cry, can feel the electric sting of unshed tears pulsing against her retinas, but she knows that Malfoy is already too entrenched in this, in _her_ —the mating pull, the pheromones—they won’t allow him to harm her in any capacity. And if she collapses right now, he would be compelled, so very uncharacteristically, to _comfort_ her. To protect her. He’d despise it. He’d question it. He’d ask for an explanation that she isn’t adequately prepared to give, because Dumbledore said that she’d have more _time_.

She can’t—

She just—

She _can’t_.

“I’m sorry,” she says again.

 

* * *

 

**_(disproved theories)_ **

She forgets her Transfiguration homework twice before the month ends.

“Significant lapses in memory can be a rather debilitating side effect of the mating pull,” Dumbledore says apologetically. “Perhaps you require…a more comprehensive diary?”

Malfoy misses three straight Herbology lessons. When she notices his absences, her claws scratch against the splintering rowan wood of her usual workbench. She’s careful to keep her eyes closed, is unwilling to see the flash of brilliant, inhuman blue reflected back at her through the gleaming greenhouse glass; she can control that much, she thinks wryly.

She spends an entire weekend in bed, sweaty and disheveled, falling in and out of hot, hazy, _fevered_ dreams that feature pale skin and long fingers and a pink, smirking mouth, swollen and raw; she rubs her thighs together, feels wet and sticky and fucking _empty_ , so empty, reaches between her legs to alleviate the pressure, endless and _insistent_ —but she’s empty, she’s empty, she needs something and she needs him and she’s _empty_ as she writhes and twitches and tries so hard to make it better make it stop make it fucking go _away_ but her hands aren’t right and her body is too soft and she’s empty, empty, _empty_ , and all she sees is blond hair and white teeth and she wants him and that and _him_ so fucking _fiercely_ that she registers a chaotic frisson of fear as the depth of her need—empty, empty, she’s _empty_ —makes itself known because it’s like dropping a penny down a well, waiting for the jarring, ethereal echo of it to ping against cement or water or loose-packed dirt, but it never comes, it never comes, and it fucking spirals on and on and _on_ , forever, dark and bleak and blank and—empty, she’s _empty_ —

She has never hated magic before now.

She has never hated _herself_ , either.

She buries her flushed, tearstained face into her pillow, and her nose begins to bleed.

 

* * *

 

**_(historical inaccuracies)_ **

“So…this _Veela mating_ …it isn’t a lifelong commitment type of thing, is it?” Malfoy asks, face pinched. Snow is swirling through the turrets of the bridge, weak streams of sunlight bouncing off the moss-covered bricks. “Because—no offense, Granger, but I would rather gouge my eyes out with one of these icicles than wind up married to you.”

She huffs, breath curling out white in the cold January breeze.

“It’s a biological imperative,” she recites, licking her lips, reminding herself that these are the facts and that they are irrefutable and that the science involved does not care at all about what is fair or not. “Its only purpose is the conception of a child. A continuation of the species. My pheromones will attract the most suitable—ah, _partner_ —and once…the deed is done, so to speak, everything will go back to normal. My body has decided that _you_ , for whatever unfathomable reason, are a prime candidate for paternity. What we’ve been feeling lately—the memory issues and the…the dreams and the nose bleeds—it will only get worse if we don’t—consummate.”

He grimaces, adjusting his green and silver wool scarf.

“Then it _is_ a lifelong commitment,” he concludes flatly. “A child. With a mudblood. Before I turn twenty. How lovely.”

She clenches her hands into fists, the soft brown leather of her gloves squeaking with the friction.

“I didn’t _choose_ this, Malfoy,” she replies, voice low. “I didn’t choose _you_.”

He glances at her, and she has trouble determining what his expression means.

“It took my parents three years to have me,” he says, scratching at his chin. “Three and a half, if you’re into technicalities.”

“I’m an only child, too, you know. My parents—”

He ignores her.

“If you get— _pregnant_ —I don’t want to be shut out. Go to Weasley or Potter or whoever bloody else you like for the, ah, _emotional support_ you’ll undoubtedly require, but once it’s born—I want equal rights. It will be a Malfoy. It will be just as much mine as it is yours.”

She tugs on the cuffs of her pea coat to keep out the frigid air.

“Co-parenting with a Slytherin,” she bites out, mocking and sharp. “ _How lovely_.”

He props his elbows up on the wall of the bridge, leaning forward. His posture is tense.

“I want it in writing, too,” he continues, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’ll have my father retain an attorney to draw up a custody agreement once—conception has been confirmed.”

She narrows her eyes.

“And _I’ll_ have _my_ father retain an attorney to ascertain the legality of that custody agreement,” she says pointedly.

He shoots her an unamused smirk over the rigid line of his shoulder.

“Let me guess,” he drawls, kicking at a clump of weeds on the ground. “You also want to hyphenate its last name—but would it be Malfoy-Granger? Or Granger-Malfoy? Are we alphabetizing? Is that what people do?”

She gazes out at the barren landscape, trees bare, branches spindly, frozen brown grass shrouded in a deceptively pristine blanket of snow.

“I’m ovulating next week,” she tells him abruptly, turning on her heel to start the long walk back to the castle. “I’ll send you an owl to arrange a meeting.”

 

* * *

 

**_(current hypotheses)_ **

Dumbledore had not exaggerated the rarity of her transformation.

She is one of a kind.

She is _special_.

There isn’t a record of any other hybrid manifestation as complete as hers has been—there isn’t a precedent, there isn’t any research to sift through, there isn’t a potion or a spell or a charm to fix her—there is nothing.

She falsifies muggle secondary school records and fills out an application for the undergraduate genetics program at Cambridge. Her parents, she knows, will be pleased that she’s decided to go to university after all. She writes her admissions essays and discusses, at length, her interest in mapping the human genome; she thinks about Dumbledore’s attitude towards her, the calculating twinkle behind his half-moon spectacles and his untoward, academic fascination with how she reacts to Malfoy.

She is an experiment to him—a specimen to study.

He will not help her.

She’ll have to help herself.

 

* * *

 

**_(controlled environment)_ **

Malfoy tastes minty, like toothpaste, and the cushion of his lower lip catches on hers as they kiss. His chest is firm and broad and strong, and she is surprised again by how much taller—how much _bigger_ —he is than her.

She keeps her eyes closed; they’ll be blue, she knows, and she doesn’t need to draw any more attention to what she is.

He rears back to pull off his shirt.

He breaks the zipper on her dress when he attempts to yank it down.

His body is cool and smooth—like marble, almost lifeless—as her fingertips graze the flat of his abdomen.

She can feel herself getting wetter, warmer, can feel his hand push clumsily into the front of her knickers, his cock a hard diagonal line against the placket of his trousers.

She shivers.

He shudders.

She hears his belt buckle clink and his silk boxers rustle.

Her lashes scrape against her cheeks as she squeezes her eyes shut, tight and tighter; there is a primal part of her that is _aching_ for this, for him, that wants her to spread her thighs and bare her throat and just— _submit_.

But she is still human, mostly.

She is still _herself_.

His mouth is hot against her stomach. His tongue flicks out, drags beneath the waistband of her underwear. She trembles, muscles locked in a fight between _yes_ and _no_ and _more_ and _stop_ and she feels the shape of his lips change, knows he’s smirking into the hollow of her pelvis—

Something starts to simmer in her blood.

He slides her knickers down her legs. His palms are soft as he runs them along the inside of her knees. His breath is coming out fast. He exhales shakily when he presses a tentative, saliva-slick kiss to her cunt.

She doesn’t know what he’s doing.

She doesn’t know what _she’s_ doing.

Her fingernails prickle. Her hips roll forward as he curls his tongue around her clit.

“What are you—we don’t have to do it like this,” she gasps. “There’s a perfectly serviceable bed—”

He stops and looks up at her. His irritation is palpable.

“I read that it’s easier for you to get pregnant after you’ve had an orgasm,” he says, and the words soak into her skin, the lilting vibration of his voice causing her to swallow noisily, helplessly—

“There are _other options_ for me to—it isn’t—it’s unnecessary,” she retorts, stumbling towards the bed. “I don’t need—we have to have sex, Malfoy, but we don’t have to—”

“Enjoy it?” he finishes with a patronizing sneer.

The silence stretches between them like strands of melted sugar as she perches on the edge of the bed. The sheets are a bland, inoffensive shade of slate blue and turned down at the corners; she wants to drag her claws through the middle of them, all the way to the springs of the mattress, wants to rip and tear and eradicate the expectations she can feel looming in every woven cotton fiber and crisply sewn seam—

“You think we’ll be doing this for awhile, don’t you?” she asks, blinking slowly. “You think it could take—years. Like your parents.”

He rubs his forehead.

“Could do,” he replies without inflection.

She pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around her calves. Her anger has dissipated and been replaced by something that feels a lot like exhaustion.

“Rules,” she eventually says, dread pooling in the pit of her stomach. “We need rules. I can’t—with you—not like this.”

He stares at her, impassive, and it occurs to her that she has never been able to read him very well. That bothers her, she realizes with a confusing burst of adrenaline.

“Rules,” he repeats, appearing to mull over the proposition. “Yeah, alright. Fine. Get dressed. You’re going to pull a bloody muscle trying to cover yourself up like that, and you’re doing a shit job anyway.”

 

* * *

 


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

 

 **_Chapter Two_ ** _: p. 50 – 78_

 

* * *

 

**_(scientific method)_ **

Three months go by.

She spends five days of every thirty with Malfoy, locked in a specially warded suite of rooms on the unoccupied side of the old eighth floor Transfiguration corridor. It always feels like a punishment, like she’s doing penance for a crime she knows she didn’t commit—but she can’t bring herself to try and make it better, and when she does see him, she can’t force her features into any expression other than that of solemn, sullen resentment.

Because they aren’t friends, and they can no longer be enemies. He still sneers at her in the halls, in between classes, and she still scowls at him in return. They have sex when she ovulates, and it is—adequate. She can get through it now without her claws tearing into the mattress, without her eyes flashing and her heart twisting, and he no longer attempts to give her orgasms in ways that strike her as uncomfortably intimate. Everything is perfunctory. Practiced. They abide by the agreement she’d drawn up after that first disastrous encounter, and they rarely speak.

It is—

Well.

It just…is.

She refuses to tell Harry and Ron who her body has chosen as its temporary mate. She suspects that Ron is disappointed that it isn’t him and that Harry has mostly forgotten the realities of her Veela heritage entirely. Ginny, though—

Ginny knows.

Hermione prefers not to think about that conversation, prefers not to remember how Ginny’s pretty brown eyes had gone dim with pity and how her voice had been uncharacteristically soft, _cautious_ , as she’d asked how bad it all was.

“It’s like—like _homework_ , Ginny,” Hermione had responded with a tired sigh. “A…group project. It isn’t—it isn’t _bad_ , really, it’s just—something to get through.”

Ginny had winced.

“You’re sure? It isn’t…bad?” she’d pressed.

Hermione had frowned.

“It isn’t anything,” she’d said tersely.

 

* * *

 

**_(conjecture)_ **

By March, she’s restless.

She is lying naked next to Malfoy, sheets pulled up over her chest, hair braided loosely down her back; he’s panting slightly, pale face still pink from exertion, and is bent over the side of the bed, rifling through the book bag he’d just summoned from its spot by the door.

“Why are you—” she breaks off and shakes her head.

He pauses, an eagle feather quill clutched between his teeth.

“Why am I what?” he demands, flatly.

She squints at the ceiling; heavy oak beams crisscross each other in neat, perfectly straight lines. She wonders if there’s a floor above them.

“Why are you being so _pleasant_ about all of this?” she finally asks. “You barely put up a fight when I…when you found out what was going on.”

He spits out his quill and turns to stare at her.

“What sort of fight would you have liked me to put up, Granger?”

She fidgets.

“I don’t know,” she replies, abruptly sitting up. She creases the sheet over her breasts and toys with the end of her braid. “It’s just…odd, I suppose, that you were willing to…”

“Sleep with you?” he snorts.

“ _No_ ,” she grits out, spearing him with a glare. “Not that. I just assumed—however erroneously—that you wouldn’t be so _amenable_ to having your future dictated to you by something you have no control over.”

The skin between his eyebrows puckers thoughtfully, and his gaze is intent as he studies her. She feels transparent—she feels _disjointed_.

“You’re projecting,” he says, scratching at his neck, the muscles in his bare shoulders shifting with the movement; he’s shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of satin green boxers, and she wishes that she’d thought to get dressed again after they’d finished. “Those are _your_ feelings about the situation, not mine. But, if you must know, I was fucking furious after you told me what was happening—I actually asked my father to send me to Durmstrang so I could get away from you.”

She chews on the tip of her tongue.

“And he said no?” she asks, surprised.

Malfoy clenches his jaw.

“Apparently being chosen as the heat mate of a Veela—even a muggle-born hybrid, like you—is something of an honor.”

She wrinkles her nose.

“Did you just— _heat mate_?”

He looks at her strangely.

“Yes,” he drawls. “Heat mate. That’s what it’s called. My father explained it all to me. Didn’t Dumbledore?”

A choking sound emerges from the back of her throat.

“ _Heat mate_?” she repeats, aghast. “Because I’m in heat? Like a—like a _cat_?”

His grey eyes widen.

She can’t decide if she wants to cry or scream.

But then he’s dropping his chin, lips curved up at the corners, and coughing out an unfamiliar laugh—low-pitched and slow, _genuine_ , hardly malicious, hardly _recognizable_ , and he’s grinning at the floor, flawless white teeth exposed and crystal cut cheekbones prominent, and she’s startled, she’s bemused, she’s—

“Yeah, Granger,” he chuckles, glancing up at her through a chunk of messy blond hair; she thinks, suddenly, that he should smile more often. “Just like a cat. So—should I be the one to ask McGonagall if we could get a scratching post in here, or do you—”

She hits him in the mouth with her pillow.

He laughs even harder.

 

* * *

 

**_(logical deduction)_ **

She receives her acceptance to Cambridge and goes home for the Easter holiday.

Her parents are delighted by the news, as she knew they would be, and they throw an elaborate dinner party in her honor; she spends the evening in a form-fitting navy dress, modestly accepting compliments from distant relatives and long-time family friends, and flirting outrageously with the caterer’s assistant after everyone else has left.

His name is Ivan. He’s tall, broad shouldered and thickly muscled, with close-cropped auburn hair and cinnamon brown eyes. He has a vague Eastern European accent that she can’t quite place, and offers her vodka from a stainless steel flask he’d produced from an interior pocket of his waistcoat. He’s nice. He’s well-mannered. He’s handsome.

Her stomach rolls; she blames the alcohol.

He asks her what she’s planning to study in school while he stacks sheet trays of unused phyllo dough on the kitchen island.

She giggles, takes a sip of champagne, and doesn’t answer him.

He isn’t Malfoy.

Her gut wrenches.

 

* * *

 

**_(empirical data)_ **

The air is muggy from an early summer rain shower, seeping in through the partially open window, and he’s undoing the knot of his tie as she steps out of her skirt.

“Go on, then,” Malfoy says, motioning towards the bed; his tone is condescending. “Lie back and think of England.”

She freezes while unbuttoning her blouse.

“Excuse me?”

He shucks his trousers and kicks off his shoes.

“That’s what they used to say to girls, isn’t it?” he remarks, grinding the heel of his palm into the front of his boxers; his cock is already half-hard, and his eyes are pinned to the crimson lace bra that covers her breasts. “When instructing them on the, ah, _ins and outs_ of doing their marital duty?”

She folds her arms over her chest.

“That was an _awful_ pun,” she snaps, ignoring the telltale prickle of her fingernails. “And— _what_ are you talking about?”

He scoffs as he slides his underwear down his legs, hand immediately moving to stroke his cock; he’s unabashed, and she swallows at the sight, throat closing and thighs tensing and instincts shrieking at her to take and take and _be_ taken—

It’s always like this at first.

“ _No kissing on the mouth_ ,” he recites in a voice like acid—burning and angry and vicious. “ _No unnecessary touching below the neck or above the knees_. _No talking during intercourse_.”

She flushes, nostrils flaring, and knows her eyes are currently a bright, blistering blue; she relishes the brief flicker of unease that ripples across his face, feels a savage thrill of anticipation as her nipples tighten and her pulse skips faster.

“You agreed to my rules,” she reminds him, dropping her arms—her body is confused, caught between what she wants and what she _needs_ , and her breathing falters as he licks his lips. This, too, is normal—they are _magnetic,_ always, in the moments leading up to sex. It is distracting. It is _confounding._

“Of course I did!” he exclaims, squeezing the head of his cock. He can’t seem to look away from her, can’t seem to drag his gaze upwards from the low-rise waistband of her knickers, and she _hates_ it, she loves it, she _loathes_ and she _craves_ and she _gasps_ as her claws come out, flinching when they dig into the tender flesh of her palms, warm pools of blood flooding the curlicue hollows of her balled-up fists— “What fucking choice did I have? Besides—I thought you’d get over it after a while, after you got used to me. _Christ_. It’s been six months and you still keep your eyes closed!”

Her lungs tremble—her mouth waters—her vision swims, blurs, fractures—she’s in revolt, she’s in dissent, she’s empty, no, she’s _enraged_ , no, she can’t choose she can’t pick she can’t _think_ —

“I already—I explained,” she manages to retort, rubbing her thighs together. The friction almost hurts. “ _I don’t want to do this with you_. Pretending that it’s something that it—that it _isn’t_ , that it will never, _ever_ be—”

“ _Granger_ ,” he interjects sharply, and then, somehow, he’s close enough to touch her, he _is_ touching her, grabbing her elbows, and there are calluses on his fingertips and she can’t—she doesn’t—he feels _good_ , no, he feels abrasive, no, and she’s sensitive and she’s aching and his skin is both sandpaper and silk and he’s speaking quickly, soothingly, but she doesn’t understand because she’s empty, no, she’s enraged, no, she can’t—she doesn’t—

 

* * *

 

**_(investigating new phenomena)_ **

She has taken seven negative pregnancy tests by the time they graduate from Hogwarts.

Their final meeting in the castle is awkward.

“How long were you in the hospital wing?” he inquires politely, adjusting his cufflinks; they’re square, gleaming platinum inlaid with small emerald M’s. They’re ostentatious.

“Six days,” she replies, just as politely. “Thank you for asking.”

He fiddles with something in his trouser pocket.

“Did they find out what was wrong?”

She sniffs, smoothing down the pleats in her skirt; she’d shortened the hem three-quarters of an inch when the weather had gotten unbearably hot, and she’s still not quite used to the length.

“Dumbledore thinks that my— _reaction_ , as it were, was caused by a combination of stress and anger,” she says, averting her eyes. “The mating pull is a bit more complicated than we initially thought—the working theory is that it felt, well, _threatened_ by the extent of my upset, and subsequently went into overdrive.”

He purses his lips.

“So—you lost control, basically,” he concludes.

She flinches.

“Yes, well. _Control_ isn’t something I’ve had a lot of lately,” she says defensively, toes curling inside her black leather ballet flats. “Over anything, least of all myself.”

He shrugs.

“Maybe it’s for the best you weren’t born a Pureblood, then.”

She wonders if she’s imagining the brittle, sour slant to his words.

“Anyway—Dumbledore said that as long as we refrain from, um, _provoking_ each other…it shouldn’t happen again.”

He offers her a crisp nod.

“Right. No…provoking each other. Simple.”

She plucks at the end of her tie.

“Yes.”

He shuffles his feet.

“Quite.”

She tosses her hair back.

“Indeed.”

He hesitates.

She looks determinedly at the far wall.

“I brought you a present,” he says, jiggling whatever it is that’s in his pocket. “But I’m not sure I should give it to you now.”

“A present,” she echoes skeptically.

“Yeah. An apology gift, if you will.”

She quirks an eyebrow.

“Traditionally, apology gifts are accompanied by actual apologies, Malfoy,” she informs him.

“Yeah, but I’m not sorry for anything, so that would be fairly pointless, wouldn’t it?”

She exhales impatiently.

“Just—take your clothes off,” she mutters, yanking at the zipper of her skirt. “We only have three days because of the train.”

He smirks.

“Don’t you want to know what your present is before you ravish me?” he asks, holding up a small glass vial.

She huffs and snatches the vial out of his hand, peering at its contents with an irritated frown.

“What is this?”

He casually tugs his shirt off.

“It’s catnip, obviously.”

 

* * *

 


	4. Chapter 4

* * *

 

 **_Chapter Three:_ ** _p. 79 – 101_

 

* * *

 

**_(outline)_ **

Her parents want to spend the summer in Greece.

“One last big family holiday before you’re all grown up,” her mother says, looking suspiciously tearful over a mid-morning mimosa. “Besides—you always look so pretty with a tan, don’t you, darling?”

Hermione peers at a congealing puddle of hollandaise on the edge of her plate.

“I’m sure it will be lovely,” she replies, forcing a smile as she considers the logistical improbability of sneaking Malfoy in and out of her bedroom at the Mykonos villa. “Hey, mum, do you think—”

“I assume you’ll need to pick up some new swimsuits,” her mother muses, taking a delicate sip of her drink. “Those bikinis you bought in France can’t possibly fit you anymore.”

Hermione nibbles at a triangle of whole-wheat toast and positively _dreads_ the conversation she’s about to have with Malfoy; she can sense a tingling ache at the base of her fingernails at the thought of how he might react when she asks him to lie for her.

“We can go look after we’re done here,” she says, dabbing at her mouth with a white linen napkin. “But, actually, mum, I really need to make a—”

“I also made us both appointments for a wax, darling, who _knows_ what their hygiene standards are like over there,” her mother continues with a long-suffering sigh.

“They’re fine, I’m sure,” Hermione retorts, gritting her teeth and blinking rapidly as she notices her vision beginning to blur; there will be shards of electric blue piercing through the normal tawny brown of her eyes by now. “Although I have a rather important call to—”

“And do you have a reading list yet for school? A college assignment? We could get some of your textbooks if you wanted to get a head start—”

“ _Mum_ ,” Hermione interrupts, pushing her chair away from the table with a loud scrape of the hardwood floor. “I have to call someone. It’s important. I’ll be outside when you’re done.”

She doesn’t wait for a response—she’s irritated and she’s flustered and she still can’t control her emotions well enough to mask her eyes or claws or _anger_ —and she leaves the restaurant.

She studies the keypad on her phone, a clunky black Motorala, and reminds herself that she isn’t inviting Malfoy to Greece for _fun_ , no, and that despite the unpleasantness of owing him a favor after this—he can’t exactly refuse to help. No. He will do this for her, and it will be every bit as awful as she’s imagining, but he will still _do it._

He has as little choice in the matter as she does.

 

* * *

 

**_(experiment)_ **

Malfoy laughs and laughs and laughs as her cheeks burn and her chest tightens—

“Do I have to pretend to like you while I’m there?” he drawls, static pinging against her eardrums as he chuckles into the receiver.

“No,” she says evenly. “I’ll be telling my parents that you’re going to Cambridge with me in the fall and we have—coursework. To do. Together. And your family has a house in Athens and—”

“My family _does_ have a house in Athens.”

She huffs.

“Naturally.”

Silence descends, and she can faintly register the squeaking of a leather chair as he shifts around.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do in Greece for three months—or, sorry, two and a _half_ months, since three of those weeks will be spent fucking you.”

She purses her lips and ignores the curious gaze of the valet attendant standing a few feet away.

“I don’t know, Malfoy—visit a museum,” she suggests tersely. “Take up drinking. Write a novel. Find a very understanding girlfriend, preferably one who doesn’t speak English well and can’t figure out what an unbelievable prat you are. It’s _irrelevant._ ”

“Can’t really do that last one,” he replies, voice suddenly hard. “Can’t so much as a get a bloody hard-on for anyone who isn’t you—apparently this heat mate business is _all monogamy_ , all of the time. Haven’t even had a proper wank since Halloween.”

And there it is again—that strange dichotomy of her mind and her body, an endless contradiction between what she knows she wants and what she _has_ to want; she feels her face flush with instinctive pleasure at this _acknowledgement_ of their relationship, even as her stomach sinks with something that might be guilt, or shame, or pity—it is unpleasant, it is thrilling, it is horrible, it is _electrifying,_ and she remembers the night she’d tried to flirt with the catering assistant and couldn’t do anything but think of Malfoy, think of grey eyes and a smirking mouth and she—

“Yeah,” she says, wary and quiet. “I—I know. Well—I didn’t _know_ that it’s the same for you, but—over Easter I tried—it doesn’t matter what I tried. I just—I didn’t realize that you couldn’t—well. I didn’t realize. That’s—yeah.”

He makes an odd sound in the back of his throat.

“Right,” he snaps, and then coughs. “Right—I’m, ah, I’m tired of talking to you now, Granger, so…I’ll be in Greece in twelve days. I’ll send an owl when I get to the house. Have a…not unsafe journey.”

He hangs up.

She kicks at the sidewalk and tries not to cry.

 

* * *

 

**_(disinfected workspace)_ **

Her mother buys her a dozen new swimsuits and a pair of dangling aquamarine earrings.

“This boy who’ll be visiting you—he’s your…friend?”

Hermione blanches into her Styrofoam cup of frozen yogurt.

“Sort of,” she hedges. “More of an…acquaintance, really. We’ve done projects together before, though, and we, um, work well as a team.”

Her mother nods skeptically.

“Are you positive he isn’t…something else? Because if he is, darling, you should really let your father know—he’s been waiting half your life to intimidate a boyfriend of yours, and I’d hate if he missed the opportunity—”

Hermione stuffs a spoonful of cookies and cream frozen yogurt into her mouth to avoid protesting too violently.

It melts on her tongue.

 

* * *

 

**_(natural causes)_ **

She doesn’t hear the boat arrive.

She is lying face-down, topless and half-asleep on a large, emerald-green towel spread out across the sand. Her hair is twisted into a loose, somewhat messy knot on top of her head, and her skin is slick and soft from the tanning oil her mother had packed. The strings of her bikini bottom—a vivid, vampy red and _far_ too skimpy, really—are tickling the sides of her hips.

Her eyes are closed. She’s _relaxed_ for what very well may be the first time in months, and she doesn’t notice the tall, slender shadow hovering above her until—

“You’ve got to be _kidding_ me,” Malfoy groans, plopping down on the end of her towel and roughly nudging her feet.

She shrieks and gasps, flipping over onto her back and holding her hands up to her breasts.

“You—what are you—you’re _early_!” she says in a too-loud whisper, glancing furtively at the skinny dirt path that winds through the rocks and up to the villa. “You said you’d be here _Tuesday!”_

He brushes sand off the front of his white linen shorts and drapes her legs over his lap so he can sit more comfortably on the towel; he’s wearing an expensive-looking, pastel pink v-neck t-shirt, silver-rimmed aviator sunglasses, and brown leather flip-flops. She isn’t certain she would have recognized him if he hadn’t announced himself the way he had.

“I was bored,” he shrugs.

She sits up gingerly, careful to keep one arm covering her chest.

“That’s not really an explanation,” she points out.

He rubs at his chin, and she can see a trace of dark blond stubble glinting in the sunlight.

“So,” he says, ostensibly changing the subject, “can I just—let me get this straight, Granger. You won’t so much as kiss me on the bloody mouth when my _cock_ is inside you, but you’re perfectly willing to lie about topless on a public beach. _Really_.”

She rolls her eyes.

“It’s a private beach, actually.”

He flashes his teeth in a sharp smile.

“That’s not really an explanation,” he mimics, fingertips grazing the arch of her ankle.

She shivers, which is inexcusable considering the heat, and fights the urge to move away.

“You’re not my boyfriend,” she says bluntly, wishing he would take his sunglasses off; his lips are pressed together in a thin line, and she can’t determine what expression is on his face. “We aren’t in a relationship. It’s easy, when we’re—having sex, for the lines to get a bit blurry, especially when the Veela…is in control. But you and I—we don’t like each other. My rules are there so we don’t forget that.”

He taps the heel of his palm against her calf and hums thoughtfully before removing her legs and getting to his feet. He appraises her for a long moment, and she has to squint into the sun to see him when he speaks again.

“You look good with a tan,” he says, tilting his head to the side. “Pretty.”

She stares after him, wordlessly, as he scoops up a medium-sized canvas overnight bag and begins the trek up the path to the villa.

 

* * *

 

**_(evidence tampering)_ **

They have a late dinner of pepper stuffed olives and farm-fresh feta and wood-fired spanakopita and then he drags her back down to the beach to retrieve something from his boat; he won’t tell her what it is, and she finds she’s too tired to argue.

“Your parents rather like me, don’t they?” he asks with a smug smile when they reach the water.

“Of course they like you,” she sighs, flapping her hand as she gestures towards his…everything. “You’re all—you.”

“Eloquent.”

She glares out at the waves, silver-blue and ethereal from the weight of the full moon.

“You know what I mean, Malfoy, don’t be dense.”

He tucks his hands into his pockets and shuffles closer.

“No, actually, I don’t know what you mean,” he replies testily. “You’ve gone out of your way for three-quarters of a bloody year to point out all the ways that I’m _deficient_ as a potential romantic partner, so—no, a vague ‘ _you’re you’_ isn’t much of an answer.”

She feels a brief flicker of remorse, but immediately shakes it off—she knows him better now, and she knows that he’s baiting her, trying to engineer a specific, particular outcome for this conversation for reasons that likely have nothing to do with hurt feelings or a bruised ego.

“No?” she returns. “What do you want me to say, then?”

His tongue darts out, wetting his lower lip, and the slight pinch of the skin around his mouth makes it look like he’s biting back a sneer.

“You honestly can’t just give me a compliment, can you?” he asks, sounding somehow both amused and frustrated. “You can’t just say—‘ _Well, Draco, my parents like you because you’re polite and intelligent and know which bloody fork to use for the fish course’_. Surely that’s _impersonal_ enough for you?”

She scrunches her nose and crosses her arms over the flat of her abdomen.

“I don’t call you ‘Draco’,” she says in a crisp monotone.

He scoffs.

“Maybe you should start.”

The skirt of her sundress flares out around her thighs as she angrily turns to face him.

“What are you doing?” she hisses—but her rage isn’t materializing as it usually does, as flashing blue eyes and screeching sharp claws and she—she wonders, she panics, she catches his grey, glittering gaze and she _realizes_ —no, no— _he_ has caught _her_ —trapped her—and she is frozen, not furious, and she _hates_ him for forcing that distinction on her, truly—

“Aren’t you _sick_ of being miserable?” he demands, grabbing her shoulders; his hands are warm against her skin, and the air smells like salt and seaweed and summer, and she can barely believe that he’s real. She takes a deep breath. “I mean, Christ, Granger, it’s pretty bloody clear that we’re stuck with each other for awhile, especially if you’re not pregnant soon—and what’d we agree? That we’d give it a year until we went to a specialist? And—okay, so let’s say that works—you get pregnant. What happens after that? What happens if you have another heat? What happens if I’m fucking _it_ for you, for the Veela? Huh? Neither of us can reasonably expect anyone to have a real relationship with either of us with _that_ looming over our heads—which means, _what_ , exactly, we’re barely civil _co-parents_ and practically fucking _asexual_ three weeks out of every month? Is that really what you want?”

She narrows her eyes.

Her heartbeat is a blistering quick staccato beneath her breastbone.

She _wants_ to shout at him—she wants to scream and she wants to scratch and she wants him to know that he has ruined _everything_ , wants him to know that she has spent months and months and _months_ very pointedly not thinking about any of this, not thinking about what she would have to do if there isn’t a cure and there isn’t a solution and there isn’t a way _out_ because just as she would have never chosen him—he would have _never_ looked twice at her, he would have eventually left Hogwarts and gone on to marry some icy Pureblood heiress who would have been soft-spoken and easy to manage and fucking fully _human_ , God—

Hermione swallows.

“You’re wrong,” she whispers, drawing her arms up, up, wrapping them around his neck and lifting herself onto her toes and—

She kisses him as fiercely as she knows how.

 

* * *

 

**_(latex gloves)_ **

“I was a virgin,” he says the next morning. “When we first—I’ve been betrothed to the youngest Greengrass sister since I was eight, and it’s customary to—wait. It’s respectful, I mean. She’s only a second year.”

She picks up a dried fig.

She puts it back down.

She picks it up again.

“Oh,” she replies, dusting tiny granules of cane sugar off of the fruit. “That’s—oh.”

He methodically stirs his tea.

“I had my father break the contract earlier this year,” he continues, glancing out over the balcony railing; the breeze is already hot, and there are white-caps visible in the tourmaline-clear ocean below.

She tears the fig into two pieces, then four, then six.

She isn’t hungry.

“Can you do me a favor, Malfoy?” she asks abruptly.

He arches an eyebrow.

“Draco,” he corrects.

She winces.

“Draco,” she concedes. “Can you do me a favor— _Draco._ ”

He leans back in his beige wicker chair, legs spread wide and posture casual.

“Probably not.”

She blinks and feels her muscles unclench—she hadn’t even noticed how stiffly she had been holding herself.

“Well—regardless—my father…he saw us both leave my room this morning, together, and he’s going to—he’s going to attempt one of those terribly embarrassing _speeches_ later where he threatens to—I don’t know—break all your ribs and use them as toothpicks or something if you ever, you know, _hurt_ me, and he’s going to be really disappointed if you don’t act suitably cowed and submissive so if you could just—pretend, please, that you’re taking him quite seriously and that our relationship is—um—based on…honorable intentions and mutual respect and, you know, legitimate affection—”

He drums his fingers on the arm of his chair.

“What do I get out of it?”

She snorts.

“You can pick the middle name of our future child,” she says dryly. “Anything you like.”

He braces his elbows on the table.

“Salazar?”

She grimaces.

“If that’s what you…like.”

He considers her with a lazy grin.

“Nah,” he replies easily. “I’d much rather have a blowjob.”

 

* * *

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a brief description of a miscarriage in this chapter. It’s short, and honestly pretty vague—the word itself isn’t actually used—but I understand that it’s a sensitive subject and encourage all of you to be kind to yourselves.
> 
> xoxo

* * *

 

 **_Chapter Four:_ ** _p. 102 – 126_

 

* * *

 

**_(objectives)_ **

The summer passes slowly.

She writes letters to Harry and Ron and Ginny—she tells them about her rampant, raging, full-body sunburn, about the pleasant woodsy scent of the aloe-based lotion she’d healed it with, about the seemingly ageless midwife who had sold it to her and who Hermione is quite indisputably certain is a witch; she tells them about how the local girls all comb olive oil and lemon juice through their hair, about how the sand on the beach is soft like powdered sugar and sparkles almost as much as the turquoise-blue Mediterranean water does in the sun; she tells them about the lease she’d signed for a two-bedroom flat in Cambridge, sight unseen, and she tells them about the outlandish mermaid stories she’d heard from a Cyprian bartender after three-quarters of a bottle of ouzo, and she tells them about the olive orchards, the windmills, the fishing boats and the citrus groves and the flower-sellers—

She tells them everything.

She tells them nothing.

Malfoy feels like a secret, even though he isn’t, and she isn’t sure yet if she wants to keep him. He’s petulant, moody, so aggravatinglyused to getting what he wants—his manners are impeccable, his accent is refined, and she isn’t ashamed to admit that she is equal parts astonished and alarmed when she realizes how _charming_ he’s capable of being.

He drags her to Istanbul for a week in July and does almost nothing but complain about the inferior thread count of the hotel sheets. He finds a set of crystalline blue contact lenses at a market stall in Rome and says he’ll have to wear them the next time they have an argument— _that way we can match,_ he drawls with his customary half-smile. He teaches her how to sail on his father’s boat off the coast of Crete and she forces him to take a picture with her when they sneak into the Parthenon after hours and he fucks her in front of a full-length mirror in a guest room at his family’s chalet in Switzerland and their relationship—

Their _relationship_ —

It isn’t real. It isn’t right. It’s manufactured, a byproduct of science and magic, and she is never more aware of that fact than when she observes how seamlessly he fits himself into their surroundings no matter where they go or who they’re with. Occasionally, she is bitter about it, about his ingrained, obnoxious confidence, his instinctual sense of _belonging_ to whatever world he’s choosing to inhabit at the time—because he has always, _always_ known who he is and what he is and she has had that luxury stolen from her more than once—

His identity is a foregone conclusion.

He is adaptable to her presence because he has to be.

She still hates him, she often thinks, but only until she doesn’t.

 

* * *

 

**_(mitosis)_ **

In the beginning of August there is a second pink line on her pregnancy test.

“Draco,” she says, drifting into his bedroom at the house in Athens; she’s wearing an old Slytherin quidditch jersey and absolutely nothing else, and she can’t help but wonder, with a brief pang of regret, what Harry and Ron and Ginny would think if they could see her just then.

Malfoy glances up from his book—inexplicably, a musty yellow first edition of _Wuthering Heights._

“ _Hermione,_ ” he returns snidely.

She blinks.

“Draco,” she repeats, furrowing her brow.

He puffs his cheeks out and blows a chunk of silky blond hair away from his eyes.

“What are you—are you _practicing_ saying my name now?” he asks. “Is that really necessary?”

She shifts her weight from her left foot to her right and then back again. She opens her mouth. No sound emerges.

“Draco,” she says again, strangely helpless.

He snaps the spine of his book shut and sighs.

“I’m hungry,” he announces. “And since you’re always harping on about _authentic local cuisine—_ we should go out. If you promise to wear an exceptionally tiny skirt I’ll even let you try to pay the house elves again.”

The cheap white plastic handle of the pregnancy test creaks as her nails dig in to it, too hard, too desperate—this isn’t what she wants. This isn’t—it isn’t, isn’t, _isn’t_.

“It’s positive,” she blurts out, abruptly overeager to be rid of the words as fast as she possibly can be. Maybe, she thinks, it will make them less real. “It’s—I’m pregnant. We—there’s— _Malfoy._ I’m pregnant. It’s positive.”

He unfolds himself from his reclining position on the bed, kicking the rumpled white sheets onto the floor in the process; his movements are slow, purposeful, _deliberate_ , and his expression is impossible to decipher. It occurs to her that it’s been months since she’d last seen him so closed off and frozen. She’s startled by the thought.

“What?”

She holds up the test. She’s shaking.

“It’s _positive_.”

His gaze narrows. He stalks forward, stopping next to her and snatching the test. He doesn’t have a shirt on, and she notices that he has a cluster of faint brown freckles dusting the top of his left shoulder. She’s reminded of a particular constellation—she can’t remember which. She’s frazzled. She’s unsteady. She’s afraid.

“Shit,” he says dumbly. “I thought this would take longer.”

Frustration and anger spike in her bloodstream, sharp and familiar, and she clings to the relief she feels as her fingertips start to tingle.

“I peed on that, you know,” she informs him, jerking her chin at the test in his hand.

He grimaces.

 

* * *

 

**_(falsified documentation)_ **

“It’s apparently common practice to wait until you’re twelve weeks along to tell people,” he says the night before they’re set to return to England. “And you’re—what? Six and a half? Closer to seven, right?”

She uses her soup spoon to prod at a sliver of roast chicken; Malfoy had cut it into bite size pieces for her as soon as the waiter had disappeared into the kitchen. Hermione hadn’t had a clue how to get him to stop.

“I’ll be seven weeks on Monday,” she replies dully, wrinkling her nose at the pile of steamed vegetables on her plate. She loathes carrots. And cauliflower. And artificially carbonated mineral water welled straight from an ancient Mediterranean hot spring. Malfoy is a _tyrant_.

“We’ll have to have my family’s healer come to the Manor for your eight-week appointment,” he says, absently swirling his wine—white and sweet and crisp and expensive and probably the _perfect_ accompaniment to his butter-drenched scallops—around the bottom of his cut-crystal goblet. “That’s when you’re supposed to be checked out.”

She takes a deep, mostly unnecessary breath and glances out the restaurant window. The sky is dark blue velvet, clear and fathomless, and the ocean is quiet, surface glassy and gleaming with starlight and white-capped waves.

“I’m not doing _anything_ at your family’s house, Draco,” she says as she pierces a limp stalk of asparagus with the tines of her fork. It leaves behind a slimy trail of olive oil and ground black pepper. Her stomach rolls. “I don’t like your family. Your family doesn’t like me. I’ll go to a muggle doctor like a normal person.”

He scowls at his rosemary _pommes frites_.

“Except you’re not a normal person, Hermione,” he points out. “You’re carrying a Malfoy heir. You’re going to eventually _be_ a Malfoy. There’s protocol for this. The birthing chamber—”

She chokes on an undercooked floret of broccoli.

“Excuse me— _what_ did you just say? I’m going to _eventually be a Malfoy_? Are you _mad_?”

He reaches up to undo the top two buttons of his pale blue chambray shirt.

“No,” he replies irritably. “Are _you_?”

She wipes at the corners of her mouth with a burgundy linen napkin.

“I must have missed the part where I agreed to _marry you_ and subject myself to—to—”

“To a life of wealth and privilege and unparalleled social standing in the wizarding world?” he interjects mockingly. “Oh, yes, Granger, the _horrors_ that I intend to inflict upon your person are _never-ending,_ my apologies—”

“ _Unparalleled social_ —oh, my _God_ , you can’t be _serious_ ,” she bleats in a furious stage whisper. “You think my willingness to sleep with you outside the confines of my _ovulation week_ means that I want to be _Mrs. Draco Malfoy_?”

His face flushes with color, highlighting the aristocratic angle of his cheekbones; her vision is swimming, though, her champagne-pink manicure cracking along the edges as her claws threaten to emerge.

“Ah,” he scoffs, “I forgot that muggles have a somewhat different view on the appeals of premarital sex. Not a lot of self-control on that side of the blanket, is there?”

Her claws rip through the tablecloth.

“At least we aren’t _slaves_ to bizarre, archaic traditions that completely rob of us of our autonomy,” she hisses. “What was that about a _birthing chamber_?”

He clenches his jaw and saws into a scallop with militant precision.

“See—this is the _problem_ with mudbloods,” he says, tone sour and cold. “You barge into _our world_ —uninvited, mind you—and think of it as some kind of— _amusement park_. A novelty. You find out magic is real and you see us fly around on broomsticks and you think our way of life is so sodding _quaint_ —at best—but that we’re all narrow-minded, inbred fucking bigots who need to be shown the error of our _shamefully ignorant_ , antiquated ways before we can mingle with the twentieth century. You assume that you’re somehow _superior_ to me—to my family—because you have liberal, ever so _modern_ opinions about—about _what_ , exactly, marriage and gender equality and the—what did you call it? The _social construct of virginity_? Meanwhile, you inherit an impossibly rare magical gene that any Pureblood would _literally kill to possess_ and all you care to do is pout and cry and whine about how _unfair_ it all is. You’re such a—”

He breaks off.

Her lips tremble.

The sudden silence between them is punctuated by the lilting strum of a street performer’s guitar—she thinks he might be playing an acoustic version of an Aerosmith song but her brain isn’t working properly and she doesn’t—

She doesn’t know.

She isn’t sure.

“I’m such a—what?” she asks, closing her eyes.

Malfoy doesn’t answer for a while. She can faintly hear him chewing as he continues to eat.

“I shouldn’t say,” he finally replies.

“Why?”

His knife scrapes against his plate—an unpleasant shriek of jagged, serrated silver and oven-glazed porcelain.

“Because I can’t take it back if I do,” he says matter-of-factly.

 

* * *

 

**_(fail rate)_ **

The cramping begins on the flight back to Heathrow.

She’s settling into her first class seat—two rows ahead of Malfoy—with a bottle of seltzer and a sleeve of saltine crackers, when she registers a slow, pinching ache permeating the lower half of her abdomen. She squeezes her hands together. She licks her lips. She looks around and then over her shoulder. She sees that he’s already asleep, a black velvet travel pillow squished behind his neck.

She bleeds off and on for six days.

She feels guilty for not feeling guiltier.

She wonders if it’s the same for him.

She decides that it must be.

He buys her expensive boxes of café au lait truffles and a seven-hundred page biography on Marie Antoinette and seems to understand something fundamental about how she wants them to interact in the aftermath—he dispenses her pain medication with a devastatingly droll smirk, makes a point of hiding the television remote under the couch cushions when she mentions a Jane Austen marathon, and tricks her into making a comprehensive list of all her favorite boys’ names so that he has _sufficient time to devise a suitably horrifying nickname for the next one, come on, Granger, keep up_. It’s morbid and awful and nothing at all like what Harry or Ron or Ginny would do for her if they knew what was happening; she suspects that it’s better, actually.

She doesn’t allow herself to commit to the thought.

 

* * *

 

**_(delineation)_ **

He comes with her parents to help move her into her flat in Cambridge and spends most of the morning taking a nap on her new bed and practicing replication charms on various household appliances. After the ice maker on the fourth refrigerator accidentally spits out a pile of sugar cubes, her parents leave to go pick up dinner.

“The sugar couldn’t have come from _nowhere_ , obviously, so do you think I somehow transfigured the water into—”

“Yes,” she interrupts, exasperated; she gnaws on the plastic cap of her permanent marker and grimly appraises an unlabeled cardboard box. “You did. Your wand movements towards the end got sloppy.”

He hums, and then leers.

“I didn’t realize you were watching me so closely.”

She chucks an unopened roll of packing tape at his head.

“No need to sound so smug about it.”

“There’s no need for _violence_ , either, God.”

She reaches up to tighten the neon pink elastic holding her hair up.

“I’m conditioning you,” she says dryly.

He sprawls out on her couch and props his legs up on the coffee table.

“Don’t most girls usually use sex for that sort of thing?”

She grins as she unwraps a matte black ceramic vase her mother had bought.

“I would, but you have remarkable self-preservation instincts. I’m just taking advantage, really.”

“Mm. You’re good at that,” he mutters.

She bends forward to pick up an inexplicable bundle of wiry red sticks—perhaps they’re decorative?—and then frowns.

“What?”

“I said that you’re good at that,” he replies easily. “Taking advantage.”

She tenses.

“What does _that_ mean?”

He yawns.

“It means—oh, I don’t know—you’re just a bit selfish, aren’t you? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s mostly just annoying.”

“I’m not selfish,” she says, taken aback.

“No,” he agrees calmly. “And that isn’t really what I—you’re right. You’re not selfish. You’re—obstinate. You can’t handle being wrong, usually to other people’s detriment.”

“And you think that’s worse.”

“It _is_ worse.”

She tears at the crooked line of clear plastic tape that’s holding the box together.

“Compromise goes both ways,” she snaps, oddly stung by his comment.

He stares at her in disbelief.

“Yeah, you need to perhaps _revisit_ the definition of that particular word, Granger.”

She opens her mouth to reply— _scathingly_ , she’s positive she was going to reply _scathingly_ —but then the doorbell rings and Malfoy is stretching out his long, long legs and moving to fling open the door and it’s her parents, of course it is, no one else even knows she lives here yet, and the pervasive smell of grease and parmesan cheese and oregano wafts through wide open living space and Malfoy chuckles conspiratorially at something her father says and her mother is tittering about plates and napkins and wine and Hermione—

Hermione feels as if she’s missing something.

 

* * *

 


	6. Chapter 6

* * *

 

 ** _Chapter Five:_** _p. 127 – 149_

 

* * *

 

**_(regeneration)_ **

She turns twenty.

Her parents buy her a pair of solitaire diamond earrings, and Draco—with a wicked, highly amused glint in his pale grey eyes—takes her to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of _The Winter’s Tale_.

Narcissa Malfoy sends an elaborate floral arrangement—a veritable explosion of pink and yellow freesias and cherry red chrysanthemums and bruised, black-violet orchids—along with a short, tasteful note written in gorgeous, old-world calligraphy on expensive ivory cardstock.

Harry and Ron’s gift—a rather dry set of texts that explore the history of Italic runes—arrives two days late in a hastily wrapped brown paper package.

Ginny doesn’t send anything, but cheerfully informs Hermione that she’ll be visiting the following month and bringing _nothing but firewhiskey because your life is probably shit if Malfoy’s hanging around as much as it sounds like he is and God, how haven’t you killed him yet?_

Mrs. Weasley knits her a scarf instead of a sweater, Luna Lovegood gives her a voucher for a lifetime subscription to the _Quibbler_ , and the barista at the coffeehouse down the road from her flat slips an extra pumpkin scone into her wax paper to-go bag with a wink and a smarmy shrug of his shoulders.

“You’ve really got to go back to Wiltshire next weekend,” she tells Draco as she gets out a brand-new set of grey flannel sheets for the second bedroom. “Ginny’s coming, and I don’t trust you not to be awful while she’s here.”

He aimlessly pushes a button on her coffeemaker and frowns when nothing happens.

“You think so little of me?” he drawls.

She sniffs.

“Absolutely, yes,” she says bluntly.

 

* * *

 

**_(telekinesis)_ **

There is a peculiar haze that envelops her thoughts when she thinks about him.

Her anger and her spite and her discomfort go misty around the edges, as if they’re preparing to either disintegrate slowly or turn invisible altogether, and his words, his actions—they take on a rather _ethereal_ cadence, not quite real and not quite unreal, that makes it difficult to associate him with any one, concrete emotion. She rationalizes that it’s more than likely just another Veela imperative. She is biologically hardwired to like him, to want him, and the vague, unsteady, _foundationless_ affection she often feels for him—it’s part of that.

It’s maddening.

 

* * *

 

**_(biodiversity)_ **

Her assigned academic adviser instructs her to register for biology, ecology, and chemistry. She takes rigorous, detailed notes, dutifully attends her lab hours at the designated times, and tests into second-year calculus with an ease that surprises even her. She is comfortable when she’s at school—she likes the rigid predictability of lectures and exams, likes the straightforward outline of a well-written syllabus, likes that her schedule has _structure_ and her professors have _answers_ and that her color-coded flashcards will never _not_ make sense. She is organized and disciplined and meticulous and single-minded and _thorough_ and her work—her marks—they reflect that.

She’s proud of herself again.

She _recognizes_ herself again.

Malfoy mocks her for it less than she had expected him to.

He visits her often—and then significantly more often when he comes over one Saturday to discover that she hasn’t remembered to eat since the previous day at breakfast. He replenishes her motley collection of neon pink highlighters with nothing more than an exasperated roll of his eyes, and he brings her takeout from her favorite Ethopian restaurant, barely even commenting on the fact that she foregoes utensils in favor of using steaming-hot sourdough flatbread to scoop up her food. He drolly quizzes her on ribosomes and epigenetics and molecular heredity, gaze only slightly narrowed at the nature of the subject matter, and he perfects a non-verbal spell to temporarily Vanish her textbooks as soon as the clock hits midnight so that he can remind her to sleep. He observes her manic study habits—valiantly tries to shift her attention from Mendelian principles of inheritance to sex—fails spectacularly—pouts, sulks, whines—and then promptly goes out to buy a Playstation and a box set of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ DVDs with which to entertain himself.

Sometimes—

Sometimes she considers asking him why he’s always there with her, always there _for_ her—

But she’s so busy, and he’s so strangely helpful, that the question never quite materializes.

She’ll regret it later, she thinks absently.

 

* * *

 

**_(recessive traits)_ **

“Two Blow-Jobs, please!” Ginny calls out to the bartender, soft strands of red-gold hair glinting dully in the dim light of the pub.

Hermione snorts and giggles into the sugar-rimmed glass of the last salaciously-named shot Ginny had ordered for her—it had been fiery orange and dandelion yellow and had tasted like pineapples and rum and honey and all Hermione had been able to think about as she’d swallowed it down was its uncanny resemblance to the precise pastel shading of the very first sunset she’d watched from the balcony of Draco’s bedroom at his house in Athens.

“How do you know so many muggle drinks?” Hermione asks now, voice raised and a little wavering as Ginny leans farther over the bar to surreptitiously steal a handful of maraschino cherries.

“Oh, um—Dean, actually, you know—Dean Thomas? He always thought it was ridiculous that wizards only had the one option to get drunk, yeah, so he—him and Seamus—they came to the Burrow over the summer and—”

Hermione doesn’t consciously stop listening, not really, but Ginny’s rambling explanation melds seamlessly into the background din of music and laughter and _noise_ —and there’s a group of boys crowding a too-small table by the door, ruddy-cheeked and grinning as they gulp at frothing mugs of warm brown ale, and there’s an uncomfortable-looking couple hovering around the scarred and ancient dartboard, shuffling their feet and sipping at tumblers of something clear, gin or vodka or tequila, and Hermione isn’t sure why she abruptly feels so _separate_ from the normalcy of it all, so detached, but—

“—Mum would have pitched such a _fit_ , can you even imagine, if Dad hadn’t covered for me and told her I’d gone to stay with Fred and George for the night—”

—but the sweat on the back of her neck is cooling rapidly and her eyelids are growing impossibly heavy and the air around her is becoming thick and smoky and hard to breathe and—

“—reminds me, Dad said he read up on a lot of the old Veela stuff at the Ministry, you know, the stuff that isn’t public record, and it’s completely fucking disgusting but apparently some of the wealthier Pureblood families used to—”

—and her vision is blurry, her senses are foggy, the muscles in her legs are protesting and wobbling and _quivering_ as she balances and rocks back on the spiky stiletto heels Ginny had told her to wear and—

“—keep hybrids as glorified _pets_ , or something, like, menageries? And I guess Grindelwald, the crazy fucker, had a whole secret _breeding program_ in Germany because of how valuable the, you know, the magical genes are—”

—and the crowd is pressing in and in and _in_ and it’s suffocating and stifling and her hair is sticking in curling lavender-scented tendrils to her chest and her shoulders and her forehead and her stomach is clenching and sloshing and—

“—supposedly had Dumbledore’s support in the beginning and then had all the evidence, like, redacted and _destroyed_ , which, how _insane_ is that, right, Dad’s pretty upset about—”

—and someone with an exaggerated Scottish burr is shouting behind her about the score of a rugby game or a football match and she can hardly bother trying to understand because the silk of her teal camisole is fucking _rough_ against her skin and the gasping hiss of the bartender’s whipped cream canister is abrasive and oddly loud against her eardrums and—

“—says all the real proof is in the private libraries of the families involved and they, you know, never talk about _anything_ important, not if it makes them look bad, but how crazy is—”

—and she—

“—thought you should know how ridiculously popular you would’ve been with the Slytherins fifty years ago—”

—and she has to—

“—and Dad’s still trying to figure out which of your ancestors the gene even came from but the French Ministry’s being all, you know, evasive and stupid, but what’s new—”

—and she has to _leave_.

 

* * *

 

**_(genesis)_ **

His phone rings and rings and _rings_.

She pushes the ‘redial’ button so many times that it jams and sticks and she has to use her fingernail to get it to work.

The digital clock on her microwave reads ‘2:07’.

She’s positive that he’s asleep.

She doesn’t care anymore.

 

* * *

 

**_(electrophysiology)_ **

It’s half-three when he finally stumbles through the front door of her flat—his hair is disheveled, his clothing is rumpled, and his expression is irate.

She doesn’t care.

“What the _hell_ , Granger?” he demands, glaring blearily at her from across the room; she’s perched on the end of her couch, still wearing the same clothes she’d gone out in, and she feels so incredibly _numb_ that she isn’t certain, for a long, long moment, how to even go about answering him.

She doesn’t care _._

“Come here,” she murmurs quietly, waving him over with a half-hearted flick of her wrist.

He hesitates, and she can see the minute downward shift in his posture as he studies her, weighs his options, plans and plots and deliberates—he rarely does anything without extensive forethought, and she wonders what it says about him—about her—that she finds it as attractive as she does.

She doesn’t care.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, suspicion clouding his tone, and she notices that his steps are light and slow and cautious as he approaches her. “What—are you alright? Hermione?”

She had been so _angry_ when she’d packed Ginny off to Harry’s and decided to call Malfoy—angry and impulsive and reckless. She’s none of that now. Her head is astonishingly clear. Until tonight, there had always been a small, soft-spoken part of her that had felt _sorry_ for him—because he hadn’t been the only to one to have his choices stolen by magic, and he was just as trapped by their circumstances as she was. That part of her is gone now, shriveled and withered and dead.

She doesn’t care.

“I’m trying to figure out how long you’ve known,” she says, her voice steady and so very, very careful; and she wishes she sounded firmer, stronger, less _fragile,_ but it occurs to her that her own honesty, her own _transparency_ , is the only thing left she has to trust. She continues. “I don’t think you did when we first talked about what I am—you were upset that day, like I assumed you’d be. But then…you just…you weren’t. Curious, that.”

He freezes for a fraction of a second—less than, maybe—and then settles next to her on the couch; the six inches of space left between their bodies feels deliberate and cumbersome, rather like an obstacle, an obstruction, and the shudder that ripples down her spine at this teasing sort of proximity is _invasive_ , terrible and terrifying in its intensity. He’s near enough to touch her. She’s near enough not to let him.

She doesn’t care.

“You’re drunk,” he remarks, tongue darting out to wet his lips.

She ignores the telltale thrum between her thighs as she watches his long, elegant fingers flex and twitch against the sharp curve of his kneecap.

“Yes,” she agrees solemnly, tamping down a wave of too-loud, too-bitter laughter. “But not stupid.”

He turns to face her, the movement bringing him that much closer—but she doesn’t fall back and he doesn’t immediately speak and she doesn’t know, exactly, what her expression looks like to him, doesn’t know if she’s sad or livid or _blank_ , but whatever he sees, whatever she’s projecting, it makes him falter, briefly, makes him flinch and pause and _consider_ , and she thinks that she realizes he’s going to lie to her before he even makes the decision to.

She doesn’t care.

He opens his mouth.

She inhales, breathes out through her nose—

And it’s shaky and it’s broken and she doesn’t _care_.

“Come here,” she says again.

 

* * *

 

**_(lost in translation)_ **

He has his lips on her neck and his thumb on her clit and two fingers deep, _deep_ in her cunt and they’ve done this before, of course they’ve done this before, but it’s _different_ this time; the pace isn’t feverish, the atmosphere isn’t hazy, and her mind isn’t locked up, sealed off, mired in a quicksand cocktail of lust and instinct and helplessness.

She kisses him like she has something to prove, and she isn’t entirely sure that she doesn’t.

“Like that, Granger?” he pants into her skin, carving his fingernail into the slick, swollen skin around her clit, and it’s too much, too rough, except it isn’t, it can’t be, because she pushes her hips up and into his, chasing the pressure and the pain, and his teeth snap at her jaw, her throat, the jut of her collarbone and the sensitive point of her nipple. “Yeah? You gonna come? Just from this?”

She scoffs and clamps her thighs together, rolling him onto his back and straddling his waist—she’s so wet she’s sloppy, and she’s so empty she’s aching, and his cock is a stiff, rigid line against the crease of her arse.

“God, shut _up_ ,” she snaps, planting her hands on his chest and lifting herself up, positioning the head of his cock at the entrance to her cunt.

His arms curl around her waist, his fingers splayed out against her lower back, and she doesn’t miss the way his grip tightens reflexively as she slides down onto his cock.

“Don’t think I will,” he grits out, dragging his hands to her hips and rocking her forwards until his pelvis is rubbing against the hood of her clit; she shivers at the contact, bites down on her lip to hold back a moan. “Because you _like_ it when I talk, don’t you, Granger? You _like_ it when I tell you how good your cunt feels, how hot and wet you are, just for me, yeah, like that—”

She rides him slowly, sinuously, and the lazy roll of her body is at such _arresting_ , obvious odds with the filthy flood of words fucking _dripping_ from his mouth—she tilts her head back, closes her eyes, registers the scraggly split-ends of her hair brushing against his calves—

“No,” she gasps, grinding down and swiveling her hips, feeling the flared ridge of his cock bump against that spot inside her cunt that’s usually so frustratingly hit-or-miss, “I hate it when you talk, I hate—I hate _you_ , God, there, yes, _there—_ ”

She hears him huff out a strangled, irritated, disbelieving laugh.

“Mm, that so?” he taunts, reaching up with one hand to lightly graze her nipples with the very tips of his fingers.

She shivers.

“Yes— _yeah_ ,” she replies breathlessly, looking down at him and taking in the jerky heaving shift of the long, lean muscles in his abdomen, the dusky pink flush sweeping across the planes of his chest, the understated breadth of his shoulders and the strong corded line of his neck—

“I don’t think so,” he muses, cupping, kneading, _squeezing_ her breasts. “I think you like it, Granger—I think you like it when I talk about how fucking _badly_ I sometimes want my tongue in your cunt, for example—I think you want to know. Yeah? That right? You want to know how much I think about my fingers in that tight little arse of yours, about my cock in your mouth, about coming all over those perfect fucking tits, yeah—”

Her stomach jolts and her pulse skips—

He twists at her nipples.

“ _No_ ,” she insists weakly, moving faster, “no, I—I hate it when you talk and I hate it when you’re _here_ and I hate that I want you, fuck, I always—I always, _always want you_ , I hate it, I hate _you_ —”

And then she finally meets his eyes and can’t help but startle a bit at what she finds there because his gaze isn’t guarded or heated or unreadable, no—

He’s furious.

He’s _furious_.

Her hips stutter.

He rears up, shoving her back onto the mattress; his cock slips free, but only for a moment, because he’s crawling over her and circling the base of it with his thumb and forefinger and teasing her clit, dipping the thick, tapered head into her cunt and then pulling away, over and over, and it’s awful, wonderful, _delicious_ torture—

“I hate you, too, Granger,” he hisses as he fucks back into her, hard and harsh, “I _hate_ you, and I hate _being_ here, and I—I fucking hate that I now know what it’s like to _have you_ because—because—”

She’s _close_ , she can feel herself hovering, chasing, _waiting_ , as the chaotic lightning swirl of her orgasm builds and builds and builds at the base of her spine—

“Because—fuck, yeah, like that, _fuck,_ ” he groans in a hoarse, throaty almost-whisper, snapping his hips. “Because I don’t think I’m ever going to want to _stop_ having you _—fuck_ —”

She arches her back and curls her toes and then every muscle in her body goes taut and tense and still—

She comes.

She _screams_.

 

* * *

 

**_(nature versus nurture)_ **

She wakes up with a pounding headache and a rather worryingly severe case of cotton mouth.

She squints at the ceiling—white popcorn plaster, Malfoy _hates_ it—and gingerly rolls over.

She’s wearing an oversized undershirt that she assumes is Malfoy’s—there’s a faint yellow mustard stain on the bottom from when her father had attempted to teach him the art of sandwich-making.

She swallows.

It hurts.

She’s dehydrated.

There’s a tall, unopened glass bottle of the expensive Norwegian water that Malfoy drinks sitting on her nightstand next to two tiny white pills.

She looks around.

The other side of her bed—Malfoy’s side—is empty.

 

* * *

 


	7. Chapter 7

* * *

 

 ** _Chapter Six:_** _p. 150 – 167_

 

* * *

 

**_(DNA sequencing)_ **

She goes to see Dumbledore.

The Hogwarts gates are more imposing than they are comforting—she passes through them, considers the faint electric pulse of very, _very_ strong defensive magic, and grits her teeth against an instinctive, uneasy shudder. It should bother her, she thinks without inflection, how unwelcome she now feels at the one place she has always— _always_ —assumed would help her, save her, protect her.

It doesn’t.

She refuses to dwell on what has changed.

“Miss Granger,” Dumbledore greets her with a wary sort of warmth that makes her spine stiffen. “What a happy surprise.”

Except he isn’t surprised, not even remotely, and she has to wonder how long he’s been waiting for her. For this confrontation.

“Not so happy, actually,” she replies archly. “Although I expect you know that.”

He glances at her over the tops of his half-moon spectacles, and his expression—the age-worn lines on his face—everything about him, his demeanor, his posture—she can read _regret_ , awful and overwhelming, in all of it.

Her curiosity spikes.

Her resentment flares.

She hasn’t heard from Malfoy in five days.

“Indeed,” Dumbledore agrees, sounding tired.

She purses her lips to prevent them from trembling too obviously.

“I want the truth now, please,” she says. “Not just _part of it_ —not just _what you deem important_. I want to know what I am, and what I can do, and what about me is so incredibly _valuable_ that a family of fundamentalist Purebloods doesn’t put up even the barest _pretense_ of a fight at the notion of their perfect princeling heir having to _breed_ with me.”

He flinches violently, she notices, at her use of the word ‘breed’.

And then he pours himself two fingers of burnished-brown Scotch, motions for her to get comfortable in her chintz-covered paisley armchair, and gazes intently into the crackling orange fire in the corner of his office.

He sighs.

“I apologize in advance for what I am about to tell you, Miss Granger.”

 

* * *

 

**_(restriction enzymes)_ **

She learns about The Greater Good.

She learns about Grindelwald; about his near-manic reverence for magic and his near-obsessive disdain for muggles.

She learns about a grand design—a top-secret, dangerously detailed plan to create a superior race made up of only the most desirable, most powerful traits of various magical creatures. _Vampire aging—or lack thereof. Werewolf speed. Mermaid lungs. Giant strength. Centaur intelligence. Goblin cunning. Veela beauty. Veela hair. Veela voices. Veela fertility. Veela, Veela, Veela._

She learns about Veela being chosen as the ‘base species’; about the maximum-security underground facility in Germany—in Bavaria—where the artificial inseminations took place.

She learns about the discovery that the ensuing hybrids— _all_ of the ensuing hybrids—were systematically infertile, even with their bodies’ chosen heat mates.

She learns about the experiments and the potions and the monitoring—aggressive fertility treatments and investigative surgeries and constant, never-ending surveillance.

She learns about the Pureblood families—those closest to Grindelwald—who were instructed to gently foster and care for the hybrids until they reached physical maturity.

 _It was considered a very great honor to be chosen to participate in this program_ , Dumbledore explains.

 _They were like pets_ , Ginny had said.

 

* * *

 

**_(conjugation)_ **

Hermione doesn’t immediately Apparate back to Cambridge when she leaves Hogwarts.

Instead, she roams through the bustling streets of Hogsmeade, the smooth leather soles of her ankle boots slipping against the damp, flattened fall foliage stuck to the ancient grey cobblestones—she buys herself two scoops of bubblegum flavored ice cream and relishes the bright burst of sugar as it melts on the tip of her tongue, browses the ceiling-high shelf of new Herbology acquisitions in a secondhand bookshop, runs her fingers over the whisper-soft ends of a jar of peacock feather quills in the back of the stationary store. Her scarf—black-and-white Burberry, a going-away present from her parents before her fourth year of school—is draped loosely around her neck, and it flutters with every howling gust of wind, tickling the backs of her hands and the underside of her jaw.

She thinks about Malfoy.

She thinks about _Draco_.

Malfoy is still a mystery to her, after all—equal parts distant and dismissive, capable of thoughtless bouts of cruelty, in possession of a rather remarkable well of loyalty to both his family and their confusing mess of traditionalist ideals. Malfoy is the boy who patronizes, condescends, scoffs and smirks and _sneers_ ; Malfoy is the boy who forgets himself and still calls her ‘mudblood’, the boy who can lie without compunction and consciously ignore her objections to his preferred version of their future together.

She _loathes_ Malfoy.

She loathes the way Malfoy fucks her—hard and rough and angry—and she loathes the way Malfoy looks at her—with frustration and contempt and desperation. She loathes his eyes—shuttered and flinty—and she loathes his smiles—slick and derisive—and she loathes his voice—haughty and arrogant and _cold_.

Malfoy, she thinks, had probably known all along about the sordid, appalling history associated with people—creatures— _hybrids_ like her. Malfoy had implied more than once that he didn’t believe that they would be able to conceive quickly. Malfoy had been _astonished_ when she’d showed him a positive pregnancy test in Greece. Malfoy had treated her like an errant, willful child who needed his guidance and his direction and even his fucking _butter_ _knife_ to cut her chicken into small, appropriately bite-sized pieces.

Yes.

She loathes Malfoy.

Draco, though—

 _Draco_ .

Draco is not Malfoy.

Draco is hardly a mystery—equal parts clever and petulant, capable of making her laugh when she gets lost in her own head, in possession of a quite extraordinary level of situational perceptiveness as well as a wicked sense of entitlement. Draco is the boy who argues, rationalizes, pouts and grins and _compromises_ ; Draco is the boy who remembers the name of her father’s favorite football team, the boy who can be generous with his compliments and emotionally manipulative when they disagree over where to have dinner.

She _likes_ Draco.

She likes the way Draco fucks her—slow and deep and intense—and she likes the way Draco looks at her—with humor and fondness and exasperation. She likes his eyes—sharp and soft—and she likes his smiles—sly and genuine—and she likes his voice—clear and crisp and _soothing_.

Draco, she thinks, could never have known about what Grindelwald had done to people—creatures— _hybrids_ like her. Draco had very firmly insisted on being involved in their future child’s life. Draco had been concerned and protective when they had confirmed her pregnancy. Draco had treated her like a friend, an intellectual equal, and had done absolutely everything right in the aftermath of her miscarriage.

Yes.

She likes Draco.

She pauses at the entrance to the Hogsmeade Apparation point and reaches into her bag, fumbling for a black wool-knit cap; she pulls it on, crushing the neat wave of long, brushed-out barrel curls in her hair, and clenches her jaw.

Malfoy is Draco.

Draco is Malfoy.

They are the _same_.

 

* * *

 

**_(triplet code)_ **

Another week passes.

She goes to class, completes her homework, plays intentional phone tag with her parents; she sends uncomplicated, overly friendly letters to Harry and Ron and Ginny, inquires about their respective plans for Christmas, accepts an invitation to have lunch at the Burrow on the second Saturday of November. She spends as much time as she can at the lower library on campus—her flat feels like a crime scene now, the memory of her last night with Malfoy lingering in her bed, in her sheets, like the chalk-drawn outline imprint of a murder victim.

He doesn’t call.

He doesn’t write.

He doesn’t show up halfway through the most recent episode of _Friends_ with pizza and Prosecco, and he isn’t sprawled out on her couch with a bag of Doritos and her dog-eared copy of _Crime and Punishment_ when she gets home from her lab hours. His toothbrush remains dry and unused in its ivory porcelain cup next to the sink in the bathroom, and his pretentious clay jar of custom-blend sandalwood-scented shaving cream sits pristine and untouched in its spot behind the mirrored cabinet door. She does a load of laundry on Saturday, finds three of his organic cotton t-shirts twisted around a pair of her yoga pants—and she finally cries.

She _cries_.

Her tears are like acid against her skin, burning hot and blisteringly _wrong_ , and her breath comes in too fast, great stuttering gulps of oxygen that leave her empty and exhausted. His absence is an open wound, sore and bleeding and raw, and she _misses_ him, misses him fiercely and unapologetically and she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t understand why, she doesn’t understand if it’s her or Draco or the Veela or Malfoy—she doesn’t understand who she is, who _he_ is, and it’s harrowing.

She cries.

She can admit that she could have accepted him, could have accepted a life with him—eventually. She could have loved him—gradually. She could have handled everything being real, could have handled his arm around her waist and his lips against her ear—forever, she could have handled it _forever_ —and she could have handled never truly solving the puzzle of her genetic code, her Veela heritage, because—

Because—

Because she could have chosen him.

She _would have_ chosen him.

She can see—painfully and horribly—the trajectory their relationship would have taken had Arthur Weasley not bothered to dig as deeply as he had at the Ministry. She can see how the days and months and years would have slipped by in a haze of petty arguments and good sex and extravagant holidays and thoughtful gifts and tasteless jokes—she can see how Malfoy would have tempered her, how she would have softened him, how the impossibly surreal nature of what they had together would have resulted in an entirely unique sort of bond; a transcendence of old-fashioned romance, maybe, but a transcendence all the same.

So—she cries.

She _cries_.

 

* * *

 

**_(bioinformatics)_ **

She isn’t complacent.

She writes down everything she now knows about herself—she consults the behavioral diary she’s been keeping for the past year, makes a multi-columned spreadsheet on the laptop her father had bought her, uses her notes to formulate a concise, bullet-pointed list of facts and suppositions, hypotheses, inferences based on scant physiological changes and the peculiar plethora of _intangible_ reactions she has to Malfoy.

She special-orders an enormous whiteboard at an office supply store and mounts it on the wall of her dining room—it replaces three canvas picture frames and a Degas print—and she tapes Post-its around the edges that detail the particulars of Dumbledore's story about Grindelwald and his fixation with hybrids. She devises a complex, color-coded organizational system for the information using several different packages of whiteboard markers; she slashes hunter green lines underneath things that still don’t make sense, circles relevant names in bright orange and important dates in light purple, draws cerulean blue triangles around potential avenues for further research.

She goes to a travel agent, prints out an itinerary for a mid-December trip to Germany, tacks it to the bottom of her board with a magnet shaped like a dragon.

She circumvents Arthur Weasley’s inquiries to the French Ministry about her magical lineage and utilizes a wide variety of muggle resources—church records, birth certificates, marriage announcements, military promotions—to trace one branch of her family to Rennes, in northern France, and another, interestingly enough, to a small farming village on the outskirts of Bucharest, in Romania. There still isn’t any indication that her ancestors had magical blood—Veela blood—in their veins, but it’s a start.

She hadn’t realized how much she had needed that—a start, a beginning, a thread to find and follow and unravel—until she had one.

She stands in front of her board, chunky wool socks bunched around her ankles, and chews nervously on her lower lip.

And she thinks, for the first time in close to a year, that she can do this.

 

* * *

 

**_(polymerase chain reaction)_ **

Dumbledore had reiterated what Ginny had said; that if any of the documentation surrounding the breeding project, the medical studies, the individual subjects—if any of it had survived, it would be in the private collections and libraries of the Pureblood families involved. Hermione has no real way of knowing if the Malfoys had actually _been_ one of the Pureblood families involved, of course, but enough of Draco’s past words and actions have, with the benefit of heart-wrenching hindsight, struck her as incredibly suspicious—and she is aware, annoyingly so, that she cannot reasonably hope to avoid him for very much longer.

She’s in the shower when her period comes.

She remembers when her period had been a nonentity—three to five days of mild discomfort and a persistent craving for dark, bitter chocolate. She had rarely thought about it, and she had rarely worried about it, and if the occasional pinching jostle of her tampons had ever bothered her—well, she had to switch them out every four hours, regardless.

It isn’t like that anymore.

She stares at the pastel pale streaks of crimson dripping down the inside of her thighs, her knees, her calves.

She watches pink-tinged water swirl around the drain.

She rinses conditioner out of her hair and frowns as the thick, foamy white residue swallows the airbrushed tint of red on the glazed ceramic tile.

She shuts off the water.

She closes her eyes—her lashes are spiky and heavy and _wet_ against the curve of her cheekbone.

She steps out onto the woven turquoise mat covering most of the bathroom floor and wraps herself in a towel.

 _They were like pets_ , Ginny had said.

Hermione steels her jaw.

And then she’s going through the motions of drying her eyes, her arms, her hair, and she’s zipping up a long-sleeved, dove grey, pin-tucked, Italian silk organza Chloe tea dress—an unnecessarily luxurious byproduct of a recent shopping ship with her mother—and sliding on lace-topped black stockings, sensuous and soft against her skin, reaching for a pair of three-inch patent-leather Louboutin Mary-Janes, unlocking the small, elaborately-decorated Russian jewelry box she keeps on her dresser; she chooses a simple white gold necklace dotted with five square half-carat diamonds, an ornate silver ring crafted in the shape of a rose, and oversized pearl stud earrings. She leaves her hair down, tumbling around her shoulders, and applies her makeup with a clean, steady hand; she is a peaches and cream complexion and spangled smoky eye-shadow, blurred brown mascara and pink-beige lipstick.

She looks in the mirror when she’s done.

She sees a stranger—a lovely, unattainable stranger with expensive taste and an icy glare.

 _They were like pets_ , Ginny had said.

Hermione lifts her chin.

She goes to her fireplace, picks up the bag of Floo powder Draco had insisted on leaving on her mantle, and tosses a handful of it into the smoldering yellow flames before announcing as crisply and as clearly as she can—

“Malfoy Manor.”

 

* * *

 


	8. Chapter 8

* * *

 

 ** _Chapter Seven_** _: p. 168 – 184_

 

* * *

 

**_(orthologous genes)_ **

Narcissa Malfoy is almost a surprise.

“Hermione Granger,” she says coolly, accent as refined as the cut of her sleek houndstooth sheath dress. “I _did_ wonder when you would show up to fix…all of this.”

Hermione moves away from the fireplace in the sitting room, only to turn around again to inspect the enormous mahogany mantle; a pair of tall platinum candlesticks stand on one end, with a trio of black-and-white family portraits clustered on the other. Everything is polished, pristine, _perfect_ —it’s disconcerting how deliberate it all seems.

“It’s _lovely_ to see you, Mrs. Malfoy,” she finally replies, glancing back over her shoulder, holding her spine straight as she plasters a small, pleasant smile on her face. “The floral arrangement you sent for my birthday was exquisite—I adore orchids.”

Narcissa doesn’t outwardly react, but there’s a tense beat of silence before she answers.

“Of course,” she says, tone reserved and gracious and somehow still impossibly cold. “Shall I ring for tea? You’ll forgive me for not having anything ready—I wasn’t expecting company.”

Hermione allows her smile to widen a fraction at the subtle rebuke.

“It’s fortuitous, then, that I’m here to see Draco,” she demurs.

Narcissa’s jaw tightens. Her lipstick is a dramatic shade of glossy dark violet; it’s arresting, and it’s intimidating, and it’s utterly out of place. It makes Hermione think about her own appearance—all neutral greys and shimmering pinks and innocent, pearlescent ivories.

“Of course,” Narcissa says again with a short, tinkling laugh. “Draco’s in his bedroom—the poor boy’s been locked up there for _weeks_ , ever since your…falling out. You know the way, don’t you, darling?”

Hermione tilts her head to the side.

“Oh, no,” she replies, careful to keep her expression quizzical. “Draco’s always preferred to spend time with me in Cambridge—although he _does_ rather like visiting with my parents, as well. However—I’ve never even _seen_ his bedroom here, Mrs. Malfoy. I’m afraid I’ll need directions.”

Narcissa’s eyes—a startling cerulean blue, nothing like Draco’s—narrow slightly.

“Ah, yes,” she drawls, “your parents. Muggles, aren’t they? I should invite them for supper—get better acquainted. After all, we’ll be _family_ one day, won’t we? Hopefully sooner rather than later.”

Hermione sniffs.

“If Draco has his way, certainly.”

Narcissa’s mouth curls in a sneer that doesn’t quite match the steel of her gaze.

“I was under the impression that refusing my son wasn’t actually an option for you, darling.”

Hermione’s composure wavers at how blunt—how _ugly_ —Narcissa’s words are.

“You mentioned that Draco was in his bedroom?” she asks, voice ringing out against the curved plaster molding of the extravagant tray ceiling.

“Mm,” Narcissa confirms, features relaxing. “Did you need assistance in locating it?”

Hermione’s stomach twitches with anxiety, but her posture remains stiff as she saunters to the drawing room door; she remembers how her grandmother had taught her to walk, how to _float_ , how to balance a book on her head and gracefully arch her neck and lift her chin and use the very tips of her toes to cling to the floor, to _glide_ —

“No, thank you,” she says politely. “I’m sure I can find it on my own.”

Narcissa doesn’t even hesitate.

“Yes,” she murmurs, “I imagine that you can.”

 

* * *

 

**_(protein concentration)_ **

Draco is scowling when he flings open his bedroom door.

“ _What_?” he snaps. “I _told you_ , Mother, I don’t want to talk to him about—”

He breaks off.

He freezes.

His eyes are tired and his nostrils are crusted in blood and his hair is a sweaty, disheveled _mess_ —

“Hermione,” he blurts out, lips dry and cracked.

Something shifts deep inside of her, slots into place, and she knows it’s the Veela just as surely as she knows that this is _Draco_ , not Malfoy—and she doesn’t mind it, she realizes, doesn’t mind it when this part of her intersects with this part of him—

He surges forward, crushing her in an embrace that’s too hard, too clumsy, too rushed; his chest is firm, his arms tight around her waist, and his breathing is harsh, hot and moist as he exhales into the base of her throat—her skin tingles wherever they touch, electricity rippling through her bloodstream, reigniting the blown-out fuses of her frayed, fragile nerve-ends—and she returns his hug fiercely, thoughtlessly, because she has missed this and she has missed him and she _understands_ his desperation, his relief, even as she aches for the strength to pull away—

“I made a mistake,” he says, looking up, pressing his forehead into hers.

She goes still.

She means to step back, she _does_ , but—

His tongue darts out, sweeps across his lips, lightly grazes her own. He tastes like salt and sweat and cinnamon toothpaste.

“What?”

He squeezes his eyes shut, and she’s reminded of all the ways that he isn’t brave, all the ways that he parries when he should thrust, deflects when he should confront.

 _I hate you_ , he’d hissed at her that last night at her flat.

She’d had to say it first.

 

* * *

 

**_(genetic manipulation)_ **

He flicks his wand and paces around his room, from the wall to the door to the window, back and forth, side to side, clothing magically folding itself mid-air as he directs it into a large brown leather satchel.

“You weren’t supposed to be able to get pregnant,” he confesses, so quietly that she has to strain to hear him. “You weren’t—I didn’t _know_ —he just said that the hybrids—Grindelwald’s hybrids—they had _trouble_ conceiving, not that it _never happened_ , not once, and I didn’t _know_ , Granger, I swear, I didn’t know that there were still people who…he said it was an honor, to be compatible with you, to _take care_ of you, and that there wasn’t a point in fighting it, that the—the experi—the _experiments_ , shit—”

“What _mistake_ did you make?” she interrupts. “Malfoy? What did you do?”

“You weren’t supposed to be able to get pregnant,” he repeats. “It wasn’t supposed to even be possible. I didn’t _know_.”

She searches his face, feeling a faint twinge of annoyance—she had already noted that particular disparity, had already found that particular fault in Dumbledore’s version of the story. It’s written on her whiteboard, underlined and highlighted, next to a grainy textbook photocopy of the biological process of female ovulation.

“I _know_ that,” she retorts. “So—what, you told your father about the miscarriage? And now he wants to ship me off to some secret underground Pureblood lab in the middle of the Bavarian wilderness so I can be properly studied? That’s hardly original, all things considered.”

Draco stops pacing.

He twirls his wand.

The sound of the zipper being done up on his satchel echoes overloud in the sudden silence.

“Not my father, no,” he says, simply.

 

* * *

 

**_(diversification)_ **

She perches herself on his bathroom counter while he showers, the wide expanse of sparkling white granite cool against the backs of her stockings; it’s less tidy than she’d thought it might be, the bottom of his mirror flecked with splatters of dried toothpaste, an empty bottle of petrichor-scented conditioner resting on the ground next to the claw-foot tub, a dirty green towel piled with his laundry in the far corner—it’s lived in, _human_ , and she feels her muscles unclench as she listens to the soft pitter-patter of the water hitting the tiled floor.

“I’m moving in with you,” he calls out, voice cutting a violent path through the thick swathes of steam rising up from the shower.

She sighs, crosses her ankles, inspects the over-bright sheen of her patent leather Mary-Janes in the dim yellow light—

She didn’t come here for this.

She had planned on getting answers, had braced herself for a fight—and she can adapt, of course; has _already_ adapted, if she’s being honest; but her mascara is now smudged and her lipstick has grown tacky and she is beginning to suspect that Draco knows barely any more about who she is—about _what_ she is—than Dumbledore does.

“You’re not moving in with me, Draco,” she says, exasperated.

“I _am_ ,” he insists. “I practically live with you already, anyway. This is—this is just a _formality_.”

She toys with the hem of her dress. The silk is bunched up around her thighs. It’s going to wrinkle.

“I thought Purebloods didn’t believe in premarital cohabitation,” she taunts him.

He takes a second to reply.

“’S’not like there’s a _rule_ against it.”

She snorts.

“Your parents would disinherit you.”

“My mother—she would understand.”

“And your father?”

Draco takes even longer to reply this time.

“My father…” he trails off, sounding uncomfortable. “My father wouldn’t chase after me, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’d—he’d let me go.”

And she wants to ask what he means by that—wants to ask about Narcissa’s initial demands for Hermione to ‘ _fix…all of this’_ —wants to ask what had _happened_ —what his father had _said_ to make him so angry, so scared—

“You knew all along, didn’t you? About—Grindelwald. About what I was,” she says instead.

He gargles a mouthful of water and then spits it out.

“Mostly. Not like you think, though.”

The sting of his betrayal is lighter now; less intense.

It still burns.

 

* * *

 

**_(pedigree chart)_ **

“You’re special,” he says as he pulls on a navy cashmere sweater.

“ _Someone’s_ feeling romantic.”

“Hardly. I’m being literal. You’re _special_. Genetically.”

“Says the Pureblood to the mudblood.”

He fiddles with the clasp of his Rolex.

“Will you stop? Grindelwald hated my family, I already told you that. Malfoys had nothing to do with the experi—experime—with what was happening in Germany.”

“God, you can’t even say it out loud, can you? Come on, once, with me— _experiments_. No? Not even going to try?”

He roughly jams the end of a black leather belt through the loops of his trousers.

“Fine. You’re pissed. I get it.”

“I don’t think you do, actually—just because your ancestors wouldn’t’ve _kept me as a bloody pet_ — _”_

“How, exactly, would you have preferred for me to bring that up, Granger? After sex? Before? Would it have qualified as _pillow talk_? Would it have _changed_ anything?”

“I _deserved_ to know!”

He yanks at the laces of his boots.

“Yeah, and now you do.”

“No thanks to _you_.”

He rolls his eyes and grabs his wallet off the corner of his writing desk, stuffing it into his back pocket.

“I’m done with this conversation,” he informs her tersely. “But in case you were fucking curious—Veela—they don’t produce squibs. Ever. _Ever_. That clear anything up for you?”

She pauses.

“What?”

He smirks.

“Grindelwald picked Veela as the—the _starter species_ —God, that sounds crazy—specifically because he thought he’d never have to worry about breeding squibs, which is—as I’m sure you bloody well know—a common concern with older Pureblood families. That’s why you’re _special_. That’s why my father…why I…why it was okay.”

She stares.

She consciously detaches from the reality of the moment.

Her brain processes while her thoughts scatter, shift, reorganize—

“I wasn’t supposed to be able to get pregnant,” she whispers, suddenly comprehending the enormity of what her brief pregnancy had really represented. “I’m an anomaly. I’m _special_.”

He ruffles the front of his hair, silky blond strands scrunched up between his knuckles.

“You didn’t tell Dumbledore about the miscarriage, did you?”

She shakes her head.

“I don’t trust him,” she says. She stops. She breathes out through her nose. “I don’t really trust anyone.”

His looks at her appraisingly.

“Good.”

 

* * *

 

**_(heritability)_ **

They return to her flat.

He spares a lingering glance for the whiteboard in her dining room, but ultimately doesn’t comment on it.

“I’m going to take a nap,” she tells him, picking at her cuticles.

“No, you’re not,” he replies easily.

She grimaces.

“No,” she admits. “I’m not.”

He falls back onto the couch and props his feet up on the coffee table.

“Go on, then,” he drawls, waving her towards the bedroom; he’s already digging into a pint of Cherry Garcia ice cream. “Go overanalyze all your conspiracy theories—I’ll be out here with my _Indiana Jones_ box set. Speaking of, d’you think your dad will ever tell me where he bought his hat?”

She squints at him in disbelief.

“Why do you want—no, never mind, I’m leaving, don’t bother me for at least an hour.”

He hums.

“But I can bother you _after_ an hour?”

“No.”

“You’re contradicting yourself, Granger. See, this is why we have communication problems—”

She slams the bedroom door; he laughs.

It’s like he’d never been gone—like he’d never even left.

It irritates her.

 

* * *

 

**_(redundancy)_ **

He’s standing in front of the wide-open refrigerator, drinking straight from the milk carton, baggy flannel pajama pants slung low on his hips; he isn’t wearing a shirt, and she’s temporarily struck by the sight of him, by the delicate wings of his shoulder blades and the long, lean lines of muscle moving sinuously beneath his skin.

“You’re being creepy,” he says, leaning sideways into the kitchen counter and cocking an unimpressed blond brow. “Either come in or quit hovering.”

She smiles, but it’s halfhearted, at best, and she wonders if he can feel the palpable air of expectation—of inevitability—that’s sitting like a dead weight in the space between them.

“Why are you here, Draco?” she asks.

His quirks his lips.

“I’m thirsty,” he replies, flatly.

“ _Draco_.”

He uses the back of his wrist to wipe his mouth.

“I don’t know what it’s like for you,” he eventually says, gaze settling on the antique analog clock affixed to the center of the stainless steel stove; it’s too dark to read it, to see the hands, to tell what time it is, but she thinks that might be the point, at least for him. “Our— _connection_ , or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know what it feels like for you, we’ve never really…talked about it. But I think it’s worse for me than it is for you, and—no, hear me out, don’t—don’t _interrupt_ , alright? I’ve thought a lot about this. And something my father said—I don’t know. Grindelwald—the experi…the _experiments_ —he was really interested in the heat mates, too, did—did Dumbledore tell you that? No? Yeah, there’s something about the magic—or—or the _science_ , I don’t know—anyway. Right. Being apart—being away from you—”

He swallows, mouth puckered in a frown, and doesn’t immediately finish speaking.

“It hurts,” she offers, quietly. “Being away from you. It…it hurts. I know.”

He scoffs, and it’s bitter.

“Yeah, no—it _more_ than hurts, Granger, that’s what I’m—look. Remember Greece? I showed up early, right?”

“You said you were bored.”

“I lied.”

She nods slowly.

“What—what does it feel like? For you?”

He rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms.

“Like shit,” he huffs. “Like—it’s all nosebleeds and insomnia and this _constant_ fucking stomach ache—it’s like…like being cursed. Can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t even _breathe_ if it gets bad enough.”

She chews on her tongue.

“It’s been a year,” she says, warily. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

His expression hardens.

“Why do you _think_?”

She doesn’t respond.

She doesn’t have to.

Because she would have never wanted to acknowledge that she needed him more than he needed her. She would have never wanted to give him that much power over her—would have never wanted to expose her weakness, her vulnerability, to the degree that such an admission undoubtedly _would_.

“Are you going to help me?”

“Help you with what?”

“Don’t be obtuse.”

He scratches at the skin below his navel.

“Wouldn’t have to be _obtuse_ if you would just be _specific_. Help you with _what_?”

She grits her teeth.

“Are you going to help me…figure this out.”

It isn’t a question.

“Why do you need to figure anything out? What’s—what’s the _point_ , honestly? This isn’t a disease, there isn’t a _cure_ , Hermione, you have to know that. So—why? Why bother? Why put yourself out there and dig into the past and risk anymore people finding out about what—about _who_ —about what you are?”

She registers the changes in the pitch of his voice, aggravated and apprehensive, and feels her gut twist.

“Because our relationship is a foregone conclusion to you, Malfoy, and—and this might not make sense to you, what with your fervent belief in the sanctity of arranged marriages, but—I’d much rather be with someone who didn’t experience…what was it? Nosebleeds, insomnia, and constant stomach aches?—if we spent more than twelve hours apart.”

He flinches.

She doesn’t wait for him to say anything else.

 

* * *

 


	9. Chapter 9

* * *

 

 ** _Chapter Eight:_** _p. 185 – 211_

 

* * *

 

**_(chromosomal crossover)_ **

Draco fits into her flat, into her _life_ —he fits seamlessly, without any discernible complications, and she forces herself to wonder if the ease of it, the simplicity, is because of her or Draco or the Veela or Malfoy or all of them, singular and separate, entwined and intermixed; she can’t tell. She doesn’t _know_.

What she does know, however, is that Draco likes sugary cereals and salty snacks; she knows that he pulls sleepy, exaggerated faces at her mid-morning bowls of oatmeal when he catches her before she leaves for school, and that he strongly prefers coffee to tea—he installs a ludicrously expensive Italian espresso maker in the kitchen, and wordlessly circumvents her argument about counter space by presenting her with a detailed list of scenarios in which she’s easier to get along with when she’s been properly caffeinated.

Another week passes.

He calls her parents, invites them out to dinner, pastes on a charmingly modest, entirely self-satisfied smirk as he explains that he and Hermione are now living together—and it _confuses_ her, even as she sips her wine and observes her mother cooing with approval and her father clapping Draco on the back; _why_ is this a milestone? _Why_ is this important? _Why_ is this blatant romantic codependency deserving of a bloody _celebration_?

“Excuse me,” she blurts out, patting the corners of her mouth with her burgundy linen napkin. “I need to use the ladies’.”

“Oh, I’ll join you!” her mother exclaims cheerfully, smoothing the top of her chignon as she gets to her feet. “We’ll let the boys have their fun for a moment.”

Draco shoots Hermione a bemused sort of smile.

“Fun,” she says dryly. “Mm. Someone hide the matchsticks.”

Her father chuckles, and her mother beams, and Hermione tries not to notice the sharp flicker of concern casting a shadow over Draco’s gaze as he watches her leave.

 

* * *

 

**_(synapsis)_ **

“I’m so proud of you, darling,” her mother says, tilting her chin up to inspect the line of her lipstick in the gilt-framed, crystal-clear bathroom mirror.

Hermione toys with the pendant of her necklace; a small oval garnet in a winking platinum setting—she remembers Draco buying it for her in Istanbul.

“Why?”

Her mother peers at her from beneath the gleaming, inky bristles of her mascara brush.

“Why _what_ , darling?”

Hermione licks her lips, tasting rich red wine and the earthy remnants of her Wellington’s mushroom sauce.

“ _Why_ are you proud of me?”

Her mother pauses.

“So many women think they can’t have everything, even if they don’t realize it,” she replies, the cultured planes of her accent uncharacteristically solemn. “It’s always—pretty or smart, kind or strong, happy or successful—they think they have to choose.”

The skin between Hermione’s brows puckers in a frown.

“I don’t understand.”

“Your father and I—when that woman—McGonagall—when she showed up to tell us about your…your _gifts_ —we were so _terribly_ , terribly sure that you would go off to that world, and you would be utterly _dazzled_ by everything that you saw, and you would…leave us behind.”

“Mother—”

“Oh, let me _finish_ , Hermione,” her mother chides, sniffing. “Really. What I’m _proud_ of you for, what I will always be so very proud of you for—you haven’t _settled_ , have you? You have each of your feet planted in a different _world_ , darling, and you’re not letting that get in the way of what you want—of _who_ _you are._ It’s quite admirable.”

And Hermione—

She just—

She feels something inside of her _crumple_ , something that had been flinty and airtight and _hard_ for so, so long, since she had turned nineteen and woken up to a scream clawing at her throat and an _add-subtract-delete_ prescribed to her genetic code—and she feels bolts unscrew and soldered iron melt, feels the supple, gentle snapping of her bones as they fall apart around her chest, rearranging and readjusting and _reshaping_ the slant of her lungs and the rhythm of her heartbeat—

“ _Mum_ ,” she breathes out, shaky and uncertain. “Mum. There’s something—there’s really something you ought to know. About Draco. About _me_.”

 

* * *

 

**_(linkage disequilibrium)_ **

In mid-November, Hermione wears an oversized red jumper and fleece-lined black leggings to a Sunday Weasley brunch.

She doesn’t bring Draco.

She sits at Molly’s kitchen table with Harry and Ron, nurses a chipped ceramic mug of hot chocolate while the two of them go on and on and _on_ about Auror training—and Harry talks about Ministry-patented shield charms, replicating the wand movements with a fennel-chicken sausage link speared through the tines of his fork, and Ron chews bites of strawberry-stuffed French toast with his mouth wide open, describing in explicit, excruciating detail the self-defense classes his grizzled old muggle-born adviser is having him go to.

And Hermione listens.

Hermione listens, and she stirs a handful of miniature marshmallows into her half-empty mug, and she wonders when, exactly, she had become so disconnected from the pattern of her old life; her old _self_.

She tells Harry and Ron about her lectures, her professors, her labs—she starts and stalls; ignores their increasingly awkward fidgeting; attempts to explain, without being condescending or impatient, the intellectual reasoning behind her and Draco’s mission to systematically go through the entire British Museum one exhibit at a time—

“Oh, yeah,” Ron interrupts, gulping at his orange juice. “You’re stuck with the ferret. How’s that going, anyway?”

Hermione _listens_.

She just doesn’t particularly like what she hears.

 

* * *

 

**_(recombinant frequency)_ **

“Draco.”

“Yeah?”

“Now that my parents know…we should…I mean, _you_ could…”

“Spit it out, Granger, I always think the apocalypse is nigh when you get twitchy like this.”

She huffs.

“Your parents,” she says, glaring at a rather messily embroidered magenta flower on the throw pillow she has clutched between her knees. “We should…have dinner. With them. Or maybe lunch—lunch is less likely to include violence, statistically speaking. Probably. I don’t—I don’t actually know, that’s just an educated guess, I don’t even—”

“Hermione.”

She swallows.

“Yes?”

He doesn’t reply for several long, drawn-out minutes, and his silence reverberates, echoing painfully in the confines of her— _their_ —living room.

“My father…we had a fight about you,” he finally says.

She squeezes the pillow tighter.

“What _about_ me?”

He goes quiet again; this time, though, the tone of it is brittle, _fragile_ , and decidedly reluctant—as if he doesn’t quite want to give her an answer.

“He—my mother—she was very upset when I returned to the manor last month. She thought…she told my father that you—my _relationship_ with you—it was making me unhappy. Hurting me. She can be a bit—overzealous.”

Hermione thinks about her last meeting with Narcissa Malfoy—thinks about the other woman’s cold, barely-leashed disdain for her, the ominous greeting that had included an order for Hermione to ‘ _fix…all of this_ ’.

“She’s protective of you,” Hermione corrects.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes. But she—she asked my father to look into you, into your…heritage, and figure out how to—well—how to separate us. Break the Veela bond.”

Hermione tenses.

“Your father’s _researching_ me?”

Draco hesitates.

“Not anymore.”

She stares, unblinking, at a wrinkled section of the rug covering the floor, goldenrod fleur-de-lis folded and creased and practically cut halfway down the middle—it looks like a javelin now, like the jagged knife end of a weapon.

“You fought with your father about me,” she repeats, nodding slowly. “I see.”

“No, you don’t,” Draco immediately argues, hunching forward so that his elbows are resting on his knees. “You _don’t_ see. There are still— _people_ —in Germany who think that Grindelwald was…shit, _on to something_ , I guess, with his exper—experiments. Dumbledore told my father that he’d been _protecting you_ —”

“ _Excuse_ me?”

Draco releases a petulant breath, looking flustered in the half-light streaming in through the window; but she knows better than to believe in his stammering, his stumbling, his staggering waterfall of professed innocence, professed _ignorance_ —because this is why she can’t trust him.

It isn’t about what he _says_ , no.

It’s about what he doesn’t say.

It’s about how he cannot hurt her, _cannot_ hurt her, would bleed for her and die for her and step in front of an oncoming _train_ for her—but that’s an instinct, an impulse, an _imperative_.

He cannot hurt her.

He can _control_ her, though, and she has never seen the difference.

“Dumbledore didn’t tell you about what—about _who_ you are, about any of it, because it’s _dangerous_ , Hermione, and he knew you’d—” Draco breaks off, gesturing dismissively at the wall of research she has in the dining room. “—do _that_.”

“Because I don’t have a right to know _what_ I am and _where_ I come from? Is that it?”

Draco snorts, bitterly.

“That isn’t what you care about,” he retorts. “That isn’t what you’re _doing_. You’re trying to trace your Veela genes back to Germany so you can _fix yourself_. So you can—end _this_ , whatever it really is—”

“Oh, my _God_ , will you stop trying to make this about _you_? Please? It isn’t about you. It isn’t about _us_.”

He clenches his jaw.

“It _is_ about _us_ , Granger, because you don’t seem to _grasp_ that you’re—you’re a _target_ , alright, you’re _proof_ —physical proof—that Grindelwald’s experi—experime—that Grindelwald’s _experiments_ , that they worked. That they _could_ work. Don’t you get that?”

Hermione yanks savagely at a loose thread hanging from the tapered corner of her throw pillow; she hears it snap, a harp string plucked too hard, too _fast_.

“What did your father find out?” she demands abruptly. “Draco? What did _Lucius Malfoy_ uncover that had him running to Dumbledore for answers, and that has _you_ so scared?”

Draco rubs the heels of his palms into his eyes.

“Why can’t you just be _happy_ with how things are,” he whispers, sounding tired. “ _Why_.”

It isn’t a question.

 

* * *

 

**_(DNA repair theory)_ **

On December first, Arthur Weasley forwards her a thick parchment parcel decorated with five bright purple wax seals; closer inspection reveals that they’re from various departments within the Romanian Ministry of Magic.

The enclosed envelope contains a single sheet of plain white paper—a short, summarily bureaucratic rejection of a request from _Granger, Hermione J._ for the wand core records of all Romanian ex-pats who emigrated to either France or Germany between January of 1875 and July of 1930.

Hermione blinks.

She dimly registers the sound of parchment crinkling as her grip on the letter tightens.

She blinks again.

She then walks sedately over to the whiteboard in the dining room; removes several textbook printouts that detail the potential physiological causes of female infertility; and proceeds, with swift, jerky, methodical movements, to rip them into pieces.

She uses magic to clean up the mess.

And she uses masking tape to affix the letter from the Romanian Ministry to the very center of the whiteboard.

And she uses cherry-red permanent marker to write a single angry word across the bottom of the page:

**_A N O M A L Y_ **

She doesn’t underline it.

She doesn’t have to.

 

* * *

 


End file.
